Prof. Isaline Bergamaschi. Both class recordings combined and integrated with the session PowerPoint (slide numbers in italics). Passages in square brackets are editorial notes or places where the recording was unclear. Where the teacher reads aloud from books, the passages are rendered in close paraphrase rather than verbatim.
Today we focus much more clearly on one aspect of all this: the invention of race and racism.
What we are about to talk about is really not easy. It is one of those things, like war or sexism, that count among the worst things humanity has produced. There is a tension between lecturing with a PowerPoint and talking about truly awful, long-lasting things that have justified colonisation, torture, discrimination and segregation. The format will be me lecturing as I would on any topic — but we are not talking about just any topic, and I would like you to keep that in mind. We are not all equal in how we can receive this content. It depends on where we come from, what our history is, what we look like.
Why study the genesis and long-lasting effects of racism in global politics and societies? Because understanding the origins of something allows us to understand how it was produced. There is nothing obvious or taken for granted about it: things became that way through non-linear, complex, contingent circumstances. Things could have been otherwise, and things can be otherwise. Hopefully, seeing how perverse the logic is — what vocabulary and what methods were used to make people believe that there are indeed several human races, which is false — can help us avoid some of the traps that contemporary conservative actors are trying to make us fall into.
There is a book I have not been able to read yet, because even the author does not have a copy to lend: La sociologie des racismes, in French, published just last week, by Professor Abdellali Hajjat of the sociology department here, who teaches a course on racisms and anti-racisms. If you are interested, you can take it as an option. I hope to get a copy in about two weeks and can lend it to you. He is also organising some fascinating events, like the Black Europe 2026 conference (link on the slides). The open part is on a Saturday, and it looks at Europe from the perspective of blackness.
(Slide 2) Racism, in a very basic definition (Guillaumin, 1972), is the exercise of a domination through discrimination according to a biological attribute, apparent or not, which determines the characteristics of a group.
(Slide 3) The book I will use most today is by Aurélia Michel (2020), in French. Its title uses the n-word — she does so in order to contextualise and historicise it; some people do not like that, I am just saying. There is a play on words, black and white. Maybe not the best title, but the book is really good.
Of course, race does not exist: there is only one human race. It exists only as a social and political reality, one that creates real material and symbolic differences between people because of social and political arrangements.
Michel's objective is to write a history of race, by reminding us that the slave is a fiction — an invention — to be understood as the monstrous product of the Atlantic plantation, that is, of the plantation economy and society. To understand racism, we have to understand the Atlantic economy. We also have to understand it as a slow, multi-secular process, which culminated very late, by the mid-19th century.
The plantation was central in the Atlantic economy and in the history of racism first, and then became secondary. The forms did not disappear after the prohibition of the slave trade — we will talk about that next week — but they took on new forms. With the increasing authority of science and the rise of the industrial and urban economy, racism became more of a crypto-scientific argument. And, sadly, very sadly, it became very popular and embedded in European societies, with enthusiasm, at the beginning of the 20th century. [The teacher refers to the remains of Congolese people connected to the Tervuren museum; the detail is unclear in the recording.] Remember the Universal Exhibitions — truly a family entertainment site where families would go at weekends at the beginning of the 20th century. In these exhibitions, Black people were put on display. So we move from an economic reality to a so-called scientific one, with a fake scientific debate and knowledge produced by medicine and biology to serve the colonial project; then it became a popular thing, with long-lasting effects on global politics and on the societies of the US and Europe.
(Slide 4) One very important starting point comes from Aimé Césaire (born in Martinique in 1913, died 2008; poet, deputy and mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001): « Le racisme commence avec la colonisation car il a fallu légitimer cette entreprise. » Racism was not a pre-existing condition. It did not exist prior to colonisation. It was produced to justify it, to make it as legitimate as possible — to convince European societies, and the planters in the Caribbean, the traders and merchants and landowners in the US, that the slave trade and colonisation were an okay thing to do, a logical thing to do.
(Slide 5) The same idea runs through the work of the Peruvian social scientist Aníbal Quijano (« la colonialidad del poder », 2000–2001). The idea of race introduces the basic and universal social classification of the planet's population, reconceiving humanity and human relations fictionally in biological terms. It is central to our understanding of global capitalism, because it was about the control of labour, resources, collective authority, sex and sexuality. These elements did not exist before it and apart from it: they developed together and sustained one another. The consequence is that it permeated all aspects of social existence, creating new social and geocultural identities — "America", "Europe", "Indian", "African", "white", and whiteness.
(Slide 7) Michel's thesis: race is a process that started with European expansion and the development of the Atlantic slave trade in the 16th century, spread through the colonisation of Asia and Africa, and is found residually — not in law, but in practice, in reality and in daily life — in democratic capitalist societies. The outcome that matters to us today is a white global world order based on the authority of the white man. I say white man, not white human beings, because sexism and racism have gone hand in hand; we will come back to that at the end of the session.
(Slide 8)
We will see several key moments in the invention of racism: the so-called discovery of America — or rather the colonisation and destruction of cultures and whole populations; then the Atlantic trade and the articulation between slavery and race, which is the outcome of the Atlantic economy (the Black man became the slave, which was not the case before; the two became synonyms); then the institutionalisation, and the end, of so-called scientific racism, its biological justification, in the 19th and early 20th century. The claim that races do not exist biologically would only be recognised after the end of the Second World War.
(Slide 9: not a racial issue — Christians and Indians; no a priori hostility.) I focus on this moment because we cannot study the whole complexity of Spanish colonisation, conquest and occupation in the Americas.
There is a great book, published about twenty years ago, that was a big thing when I was at university, for good reason: Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States. He says: I am not going to tell the story of the US through the founding fathers, the treaties, the soldiers and generals and first presidents. I will study it from the perspective of women, Black people, workers, immigrants — from below.
The first pages of the book draw on the archives about the arrival of Columbus in the Bahamas, and later in what is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Zinn tries to capture the mindset, the motivations and the interpretations of the people who were on those boats and saw land, thinking they were going to India. I read from it in paraphrase: the Arawak men and women came out of their villages onto the beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big ship; when Columbus and his sailors came ashore with swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them and brought food, water and gifts. Columbus noted in his journal that they brought parrots and balls of cotton and many other things, and traded willingly everything they owned for glass beads and bells.
We know this type of text is influenced by exoticisation and also idealisation — and Columbus had an interest in this: he was talking to the people who had funded his expedition in Europe. The more he talked about resources and their easy availability, the more likely they were to fund a second expedition, with these big boats, which were really expensive.
(Slide 10) Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation states like France, England and Portugal. Most of its population were poor peasants; the nobility represented 2% of the population and owned 95% of the land. Not an equal society — and England was not either. For some of the people involved, displacing people from their land was not completely unacceptable: it had been done in Europe as well, with the movement of the enclosures, which stopped the common use of land by poor peasants and triggered massive migrations abroad because people could no longer live a decent life in rural areas, across the whole of the UK basically. The Catholic Church had expelled all the Jews and driven out the Moors. And like other states of the modern world, Spain sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth — more useful than land because it was tradable and could be converted into spices, metals, cotton, sugar, whatever.
In return for bringing back gold and spices, they promised Columbus 10% of the profits — so he had a personal interest in this, a bonus — and governorship over the newly found lands, along with a new title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He was a merchant clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, a part-time weaver, the son of a skilled weaver, and an expert sailor. He set out with three sailing ships, the largest of which was the Santa Maria, perhaps 100 feet long, with 39 crew members.
Columbus wrote that Hispaniola was a miracle: fertile and beautiful mountains, plains and pastures; unbelievably good harbours; many rivers, most of which contain gold; great mines of gold and other metals. The Indians, he said, were so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who had not witnessed it would believe it: when you ask for something they have, they never say no; on the contrary, they offer to share. He concluded his report by asking their majesties for a little help, and in return promising to bring from his next voyage as much gold as they needed and as many slaves as they asked.
The second expedition was given 17 ships and more than 1,200 men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields, they ordered all persons aged 14 or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a token had their hands cut off and were left to die.
In ancient Greece, in medieval European societies, there were distinctions between barbarians — those who are not from here, not like us — and distinctions between Christians and non-Christians, and the Moors; remember the Crusades. The story we are about to go through is the story of the fading of these earlier criteria — "not like us", "not from here", non-Christian: religious criteria, political criteria — and the rise of a different one. It is not that hierarchies, discrimination and enslavement did not exist around the world before. What is distinctive and emerged from the Atlantic economy is the supposed supremacy of white people and the biological arguments: it is because of how non-Europeans are that we can treat them this way.
You should all have heard of the debate of Valladolid, but maybe that was a while ago, and depending on where you studied before, it is useful to make sure we have a common base. People sometimes say it was a debate about whether Indigenous people have [a soul — word inaudible]. It was more a debate about whether it was legitimate to wage war against them in order to evangelise them more easily and efficiently.
(Slide 15) The context: the encomiendas — a parcel system, the introduction of private property through forced displacement and dispossession, the robbery of Indigenous land translated into European property — had been instituted in 1503. The New Laws of the Indies (1542), which we will discuss next time, led to their disappearance; in 1549 the order was to avoid military confrontation. The Junta, on behalf of the Emperor, gathered 15 theologians and jurists to discuss and constitute the form and laws by which the Holy Catholic faith could be preached in the New World, and in what form those peoples might be subjected to the Majesty of the Emperor. There is an optional black-and-white film in French that recollects the arguments of both sides, honestly and okay-ish (link on the slide).
A common misconception: the film presents it like a court tribunal, with 15 people in a room, de las Casas and Sepúlveda exchanging arguments face to face in front of judges or referees. That is not how it happened. It happened mostly through letters and books that these people sent to one another and published. Having a book published and circulating in the Spanish elite of the time was a big thing, and Sepúlveda fought hard for his to be published and read. It lasted many years after the formal dates of the debate (1550–51), mostly not in person — I think there was one occasion on which they briefly met and argued face to face. It was not on Twitter; it was letters and books that took months to circulate among the people interested or mandated to talk about these issues.
The two positions (slides 16–17), very different in profile and in the sources of their legitimacy — which can explain their ideological differences:
Bartolomé de las Casas — Dominican priest, Bishop of Chiapas, disciple of Montesino. Self-taught, not a theorist; he had a very basic reading of philosophers and theologians, not very well assimilated, and gave more importance to experience than to theory. He had lived many years in the "New World", so he had first-hand experience, and he personally renounced the encomienda: he refused to become the owner of stolen land in Cuba. He adopted as his lifelong objective the liberation and evangelisation of the Indians — the final purpose was not that they should not become Christians; the disagreement was about how to get there. He sometimes exaggerated the facts he denounced, hid some of what he saw of the Indians' practices, and misinterpreted quotes and references.
Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda — trained at the universities of Alcalá and Bologna under prestigious professors and patrons of the highest rank (nobles, cardinals, popes, emperors, kings), dealing with the most diverse questions from a theoretical point of view. His treatment of the Indian "problem" disregarded any first-hand knowledge: he never travelled to the New World; his approach was a deductive, theoretical application of general ideas to this case. He was supported, as you can imagine, by the owners of the stolen Indigenous land, who had an interest in the argument he developed.
The question — should the Spaniards wage war against the Indians? (slide 17)
On sacrifices, which Sepúlveda had never witnessed (as we saw, he was not too interested in facts): de las Casas said, I am not saying it does not exist, but it is about 50 people per year in the whole occupied territory — he was trying to minimise and probably be more realistic. Sepúlveda claimed it was tens of thousands every year, so a war would not make a difference because they were already killing each other at such a scale that we should just go for it. Let's colonise them because they have wrong practices — does that ring a bell? It is still a very strong line of argument of imperialism: let's save these people from themselves by bombing them, kind of.
The two also disagreed on the meaning of "barbarian". De las Casas does not deny that barbarian people may exist, but says they are exceptional, and he tried very hard in his writings to associate one group of people with that identity. He denied that the Indians had the characteristics of supposed barbarians. He recognised that the Indians had developed complex civilisations different from the European one, and the diversity of cultures in the Americas. He questioned the dichotomy between barbarism and civilisation — he even called the Spaniards barbaric for their violent behaviour in the New World. His arguments went as far as recognising the right of the Indians to exercise sovereignty over themselves and their territories: becoming Christian would not necessarily mean becoming subjects and slaves of the Spanish crown. Sepúlveda, by contrast, applied the term to the whole diversity of Indian societies, building an argument based on ontological difference: they are different and inferior per se — it is about who they are — and he admitted only the European as a legitimate civilisation.
Remember the image of two blocs, the Europeans and the others — just as in the colonisation of Indonesia, it is an illusion. There was another battle being fought, very much a Spanish affair. People disagree about who won and who lost the debate, because both contenders claimed to have won. What followed in Spanish policy in the Americas was mixed and mitigated; it did not completely determine what came next.
The result was mixed because Sepúlveda was relegated to lesser offices (a form of demotion), but at the time most of the law people were with him, and he received a huge donation from the Cabildo of Mexico (1554), which had an interest in propagating his ideas because they justified the exploitation of Indians in Mexico.
1551 is important. First, further conquests were suspended pending the decision of the Junta; discoveries and conquests were forbidden unless authorised from Madrid. What was at stake, possibly mostly, was an attempt by the Spanish crown to centralise power and keep control of what was happening in colonies very far from home. Those involved were religious missionaries, but also convicted criminals, religious minorities, and poor people promised free land and free slaves. For the Crown, it was about making sure that the encomenderos, the missionaries and everyone else could not simply take the next mountain, the next hill, the next city because they wanted to. Permission from Madrid is not an anecdote. The Crown took advantage of the debate to support its primacy over the Indies and to restore authority over the priests, the conquistadors and the encomenderos — and over people like de las Casas, the religious figures developing their own philosophy about the Indians. As one consequence, the Inquisition was created in the Americas (1569 on the slide) — not just to control the Indians, but also the Spaniards.
The Spanish were urged by the authorities to avoid confrontation with Indian populations; the forceful invasion of Indian territory was discouraged, and violence was supposed to be reduced to the minimum required. In 1573 the word "conquest" was abandoned and replaced by a term still popular in Western military doctrines: "pacification". In resource-rich areas they decided not to conquer any more, which opened a new phase of colonial reorganisation and urban expansion, with the generalisation of mines. It did not end the systematic death and mistreatment of the Indians. The encomienda system progressively lost its meaning and political power; Indians gradually became direct tributaries — not serfs — of the Crown, subject to civil law like other subjects. But forced labour continued, the Spaniards kept strong social power, and the conquest was now characterised as "iniquitous, illicit and unjust" — more protection for the Indians in theory, but "no radical change in the policies". It also paved the way for the African slave trade, via Portugal and Brazil.
(Slide 20 — two film suggestions:) El abrazo de la serpiente (Ciro Guerra, 2015, Colombia), beautiful; and Adiós, salvaje (Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento, 2023), a documentary produced in Brussels by Colombian filmmakers — harder to find, but really, really good. If you have time on your hands I can recommend hundreds of movies, documentaries and books on pretty much any of this; just ask. I am putting the links in the slides section.
Slide 21: when the Black man became the slave; when racism was naturalised (16th–19th c.).
Let us avoid the arguments of our racist uncles, if you have one. The Arabs did it to Africans as well; African Black empires did it to others; servitude — serfs — was present in medieval Europe too. Unfortunately, it has been a common thing in many places, and it has not disappeared. There are people today in the Kayes region of Mali, toward Senegal, mobilising through law, petitions and social media because they consider that the way other castes treat them is slavery. Female domestic workers; Mexican and Chinese people working in factories — is it voluntary, decent work? A lot of people do not think so. So yes, it has existed, but that does not mean one thing equals the other, or that you can say whatever you like over the Christmas dinner.
(Slide 22) Forced labour and slavery existed in diverse situations, common in all empires since Antiquity, and not about skin colour. It was a degrading social position, sometimes temporary: slaves in ancient Greece were not full citizens, not full legitimate members of their host society; their link to society was always determined and mediated by the authority of their masters. Excluded from the civitas — a "non-parent".
Trade routes developed with the extension of Islam from the 7th century: two routes, along the Nile (today's Egypt) and across the Sahara. The empires of West Africa — the Kingdom of Ghana, the Mali Empire (1324 on the slide), the Songhai Empire (peak in the 15th–16th century) — traded slaves (slide 23: pre-colonial West African empires had slaves; picture of the mosque in Djenné). Very rich empires, by the way: if you look at today's GDP rankings, you would be surprised. It was not about skin colour; it was the result of we won a battle, we'll take some of your population and they will work for us — a political arrangement, or at least a defeat. The capital city was Timbuktu; slaves were traded there as in other places. It was the fact of military societies, the power of an aristocracy, not a transcontinental market.
In Europe, slavery among Christians was progressively forbidden from the 11th century, and the transformation of slave labour became the system of serfdom.
The Atlantic slave trade reactivated these old routes — remember, each phase of globalisation does not erase the previous one, but recycles some of its useful patterns — and used local intermediaries, of course. Some Africans traded other Africans; and yes, that also happened in other places, I promise. What is important is the change in scale and in meaning: from a political or economic rationality — a war — to racial prejudice. That is what happens during and after the Atlantic economy. And slavery was reinvented by the Europeans in the Americas from the late 16th century, after they had virtually prohibited it on their own land.
Something significant — I am not saying great, I am saying significant — that you will not hear much about: the Portuguese, big in the earlier phases of "exploration" (some of whom wanted to focus on North Africa, where they started). In São Tomé, in the 1470s–80s, they exchanged gold for slaves, brought people from Angola and Gabon, and produced sugar. By moving people outside of their societies, disconnecting them from the place where the commodity was produced but controlled by the Portuguese, they created a breakthrough in the conception of the economy. Sugar cannot be grown in Europe — too cold (maybe it will come, but not yet). So they appropriated territories, took the labour force from elsewhere, and lifted the major constraints faced until then by societies and economies: production centres could now be far from political centres, markets outside your national territory, and tropical zones could be occupied and adapted for the production of high-added-value products. Some consider this the birth of economic modernity and of merchant capitalism, as well as a prelude to the Atlantic slave trade. We start to move populations around by force: a new articulation between capital, labour and services.
*(Slide 25: the "sugar plantation complex", Drayton in Hopkins, 2002 — the dynamism of world trade between the 15th and 19th centuries; primitive accumulation leading to the industrial revolution; "at the cutting edge of capitalist civilisation"; global circuits of bullion, sugar, cotton, wheat, beef and debt; the "periphery acting as centre" — Africans and then Black people in the Americas "shaped the terms of integration over 400 years"; the "debt frontier" of financial speculation.)* I will give you numbers and dates for the slave trade next week, and then we will see how it ended — not completely, but in law.
This is when the institution of slavery turned into the institution of race: the plantations of the Caribbean and the Americas became laboratories of racism, where social, economic and sexual relations were made possible, defined and institutionalised. African people were used as the energy of the plantation system at an industrial level. De-humanisation became an economic and psychic necessity. By the mid-18th century slavery was doomed, but racism did not end — hence "scientific" racism, and modern colonialism as "racist at its core" (Robert J. C. Young, 2015).
(Slide 27) By the mid-18th century, the slave is the African man: slave = African, a metonymy dating from the 16th century. See Diderot's Encyclopédie (1751), entry "nègres" — not all the different forms of slaves that have existed in history, but the Black slave in America. This is related to the Westernisation of the world and to capitalism, and to a circular logic of brutality: as Steinmetz (2005) puts it, the colonial state's insistence on treating the colonised as different and inferior was one means of justifying their continuing subjugation.
Trigger warning: the video on the slide (C-SPAN, 24'–37') speaks about the slave ship; it is truly awful. It speaks about the realities of the journey. Marcus Rediker (the 2007 book) is based in the US and focuses on the sea, the ocean, the ships. Next week I will tell you about pirates, because he has worked on pirates as characters of globalisation — it is quite exciting. He says: instead of focusing on national states, national borders and national histories, look at the Caribbean and what happened there; look at the ocean and the ships on it; look at the movements of sailors, pirates, slaves and former slaves between the Caribbean islands and the United States.
The slave ship was a floating dungeon, a "tree of violence" (as he puts it), a big industry of violence and the site of great drama — and, for what is of interest to us, an engine of globalisation. It was a founding moment of US and global history and of capitalism.
Numbers versus people. There are interactive maps of the four centuries of the trade: you see the number of ships leaving Africa for the Caribbean and America, where they originated and when it intensified — much later than we would like to believe, and mostly England doing the business after a while. I will give you links next week. But Rediker says statistics, while essential, put the reality at a distance through the illusion of quantitative data: you see thousands, millions of people, but not each individual human being. So he looks precisely at the human dimension.
The journey as transformation. The Atlantic crossing was the transition from being, for example, Mandinka or Yoruba to becoming "black" — which is what they would then be in the Americas — and a transition from being treated as a human being (maybe on unequal terms, as in any other society) to no longer being treated as one on arrival in the Caribbean or America: they would just be slaves. Many died on the ships. And those forced on to the boats would not really have thought of themselves as Black or African: they were Black people in Black societies, divided by important lines — language, religion, the empire or political circle they belonged to, fishermen or rural people or city merchants. They were very different people, who often could not speak the same language: the Mandinka (the Mali empire region) would not speak the Yoruba language (today's Nigeria). They became African and Black through the journey, because they could barely understand one another.
These identities persisted in America and the Caribbean and sometimes acted as resources against the slave system. People were forcibly assimilated into an inhuman, unequal society, but at the same time tried to maintain cultural patterns. In some uprisings in Jamaica, for example, the archives show that the people involved came from the same African region and that these bonds persisted. Rediker: the sea is history, and the slave trade was a founding moment in US history and in the history of capitalism.
Insurance and the value of a human life. The slave ships were insured: if the ship sank, the merchant or slave owner claimed reimbursement for the loss — and on some occasions also when it did not, because people had been thrown overboard for rebelling. Rediker says this introduced a way of evaluating the value of a human life: how much is the content of your slave ship worth? It is, according to him, an important point in the commodification of life typical of capitalism, well before workers in the factories of northern England. The value put on each human being was not very high; the ships were so overcrowded that this is how the trade was made profitable.
The slave ship and the factory. The global world as we know it would not exist without the slave ship and the plantations, he says. The discipline imposed on slave ships defined the premises of the organisation of capitalist industry — the division of space, the division of labour, workers organised as soldiers. (That is a sentence by Marx; but, says Rediker, it did not start with the capitalist factories: it started earlier on the slave ship.) With the sailors and the slaves, the working class was born before industrialisation and before the factories. The death rate was very high for sailors too: they were not there by choice, but because they hoped to be bailed out of debt or prison.
[Slide 29 (optional, not discussed aloud): sexism and the experience of Black female slaves — see Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), inspired by Margaret Garner, who fled from Kentucky to free Ohio in 1856 after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.]
(End of the first class: "Next week we'll talk about how people rebelled about these things, and that's going to give us more hope.")
[Second class. The PowerPoint did not work at the start; the teacher begins without it, then resumes at slide 30, where the previous session stopped.]
I am really sorry — the classroom is busy before we come, so there is no point in my arriving early to test things, and when it does not work it is already 12, 11. If you can, open the PowerPoint on your own devices. We are on slide 30, where we stopped last week.
The context was the shift to a truly ontological, racial and racist scheme. With Elsa Dorlin (La matrice de la race, 2009) we are looking at the case of France, which is just one example.
In different historical contexts and geographies, hierarchies between groups, and the practice of slavery, could be justified by many different things. On the slide, a first column summarises the previous regimes of justification — factors external to human beings, tied to economic and political power relations:
What is the problem with that narrative, and why did it become outdated? Remember: the most extreme racism used so-called biological evidence, claiming to be scientific, using the form and appearance of science. Domination now had to be justified by biology, because slavery was in theory and in law no longer possible. We are talking about the whole 19th century, and scientific racism into the beginning of the 20th, because slavery had become illegal and the regime of justification therefore changed.
The challenge: migrations. The 19th century is the big century of migration: Europeans moving to Australia, South Africa, the US in huge numbers. In the British Empire there were also intra-imperial movements: the British moved populations from one colony to another, as slaves or semi-slaves. That is why, if you meet someone from Durban in South Africa, they will very likely look Indian: people had been moved from India to South Africa.
Because of these migrations, narratives about "races" (people at the time believed there were different human races) no longer served the interests of the slave and post-slave economy. If it is a matter of climate, what do you do with these population movements? Would Black people become superior or equal to Europeans if they moved to the European climate — would their temper change? And, conversely, would whites become weaker in the colonies? So, increasingly, the characteristics defining who will be master and who will be slave had to be attached to skin colour: it does not matter whether people move around, or even have sex and babies together, because you know their rank from their appearance and from genetic, natural, biological characteristics.
The matrix: internal, genetic, natural, biological causality. There is a radicalisation of these discourses around ontological criteria — it did not happen overnight; several steps were taken:
They are thus considered biologically incapable of sovereignty. Temper determines physiology and psychology, and hence the value of the different races. It is not about what they do, or their political regimes, or whether they practise human sacrifice in the mythology and fantasies of de las Casas and Sepúlveda, who used huge numbers that could not be proven and corresponded to no material reality.
A perverse circle. One very perverse thing about the whole system, highlighted by Rediker, Dorlin and Michel: the bad treatment and inhuman conditions imposed on Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans are used against them. They have no access to health or education, they lack food and water and everything else; sometimes, to escape, they use violence against others or themselves — and that is then used as testimony of their "savage nature", recycled against those considered inferior.
Co-constructed with gender (slide 30): it is interesting to notice, though I will not go into detail, that late-19th-century medicine and biology did the same to women. Skull analysis — phrenology, used to prove the inferiority of Black people — was also used against women, whose supposedly smaller skulls were taken as proof of lesser intelligence or ability to govern themselves and make decisions.
(Slide 31) This is the progressive ending of the institution of slavery — not the practice, the institution — and the institutionalisation of race and the climax of racism: a crypto-scientific discourse that is a political answer to the question of abolition. If not by law, then the different treatment of African Americans in the southern US, for example, had to be justified in some other way. That is what scientific racism was doing.
(Slide 32 — new context: a fragile institution.) The Independence Wars and the role of Black people in them; the end of slavery (1815–50) was an excuse for colonial expansion — in Algeria in 1830 there were fewer than 100 slaves, yet it became an argument for colonisation in French policy-making circles. Settlement colonies: the USA, the Cape, Algeria. Revolts: the Amistad (1839). Liberals like Tocqueville (1849), pro-trade and mass consumption, against planters (pro-plantation, pro-reparations).
Slavery as a justification for colonisation. Another very perverse thing: the fight against slavery itself was used to justify colonisation. It implied going deeper into the hinterland in order to destroy the trading networks responsible for the massive human trafficking that the slave trade was, and any evidence of remaining slavery — whether related to the Atlantic trade or anterior to it — was used by Europeans as an excuse to colonise territories. The discourse changes: slavery, which was marginal in Algeria, became an argument for colonisation.
(Slide 33 — the new functions of race and racism.) The new resource that makes a new system possible (division of labour, allocation of resources). With the rise of democratic institutions, it cannot take a legal form. Migration as a solution to overpopulation and urban uprisings in Europe, plus new markets. A proliferation of racial categories to deal with the "dangers" of inter-racial sex. Scientific racism is the fruit of the barbarian imaginary, plus the needs of capitalism, plus the nation: a dispositif de pouvoir whose emergence took more than a century.
Throughout the 19th century, new knowledge and scientific societies supported the colonial project — parts of geography, history and anthropology; popular accounts of adventures — here with Livingstone, who travelled across Africa from 1848 [the recording says he died in the Congo for Leopold II; in fact Livingstone died in present-day Zambia in 1873 and was not in Leopold's service]. The Ethnological Society of Paris was founded in 1839 (with W. F. Edwards; zoology, medicine, ethnology, phrenology). This is quite disturbing: it was not a story of stupidity versus intelligence. It is much more complex, and shows that in some instances zoology, medicine, ethnology and phrenology contributed to, or claimed to determine, the characteristics and abilities of races. (Slide 35 also names d'Eichthal, who took part in the "campaign" in Algeria; Gobineau's Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines*, 1853; and Darwin, 1859, whose struggle for life became associated with a racial struggle.)*
On Darwin: the line is about races being more or less adapted to survive natural selection — "struggle for life" associated with a racial struggle. Remember also that in the key written texts of the time, "Black man" and "slave" became synonymous. [A fragmentary passage follows, suggesting that the link between this discourse and the Holocaust is underestimated.]
This discourse was, on the one hand, tied to the colonisation of sub-Saharan Africa, which came late in history. A caution: the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 was not the day on which the fate of Africa was decided. Things had started before and continued after; tensions and negotiations went on. It was still an important milestone, and it was mostly about the Congo. It reorganised relations between nations in Europe (race and nation); it implemented the free circulation of resources on the different markets; it defined zones of influence on the principle of "first come, first served"; and, importantly, if you controlled a coastal area, any European power was entitled to control its hinterland — a massive incentive to establish some form of control and get ownership of the land. In the colonies, the government of "races".
The slide adds the "neo-crusade" imagery: the Black man is depicted as perpetually distancing himself from civilisation — lazy, childlike or womanlike, naive, happy, festive, barbarian, cheating, rebellious, over-sexualised.
At the same time, things transformed in the US after the Civil War (1861–65) and the freeing of enslaved people, which converted into segregation practices in the South — written into law in some states (1896 → 1964–65 on the slide). So there is a slow road to freedom for enslaved people, and very contradictory dynamics on different scales and continents: segregation in law in the US, half a victory against the institution of slavery — and, at the same time, a new project of colonisation for sub-Saharan Africa.
A racial hysteria — not only among the elites of the southern US or Europe. Bismarck depicted Germany as a saturated power in the heart of Europe, which nevertheless needed to expand in order to fulfil its potential — imposing its existence on its neighbours in Europe. So the discourse about races and territorial expansion is not just about Africa. One can argue that the popularity of the racist discourse about enslaved and Black people at the beginning of the 20th century paved the way for the antisemitic discourse that followed. It is perhaps not a coincidence that in the early 20th century people went to universal exhibitions — to what were then called human zoos — a context in which hierarchies between groups of people were naturalised, and in which, building on older roots and policies, the Jews of Eastern Europe, and then of the whole of Europe, became targets.
UNESCO, 1950, declared that race does not exist from a biological perspective and cannot justify any policy: racism is condemned morally and legally — even though segregation remained state policy in the US and in South Africa under the apartheid regime.
In his Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Césaire wrote that Europe is morally and spiritually indefensible, and that Hitler applied to Europe colonial procedures that until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria and the Blacks of Africa. It took a genocide for race to be scientifically and politically discredited once and for all by the UN and the so-called international community; it took race destroying Europe for the whole edifice of racism to be discredited.
The slide links Bismarck's "saturated power" to the Nazi Lebensraum (Orain, 2025: the Nazis applied colonial logic to Eastern Europe): a white colonial project, plus inner nationalism, plus the 1929 economic crisis, equals fascism and the "racial delirium" of the masses in the 1920s–30s (Michel, 2020).
But the practice and ideals of racism have not disappeared. Professor Rediker argues that the prison in the US today is a modern slave ship — the new channel through which racism is implemented, a political reaction to the civil rights movement and the end of segregation: now that African Americans are equal in rights once and for all, there is a new way of treating them differently. He sees this radicalisation of the justice system, with its bias against Black people, as also related to the transformation of capitalism: for forty years capitalism has gone through structural crises, finds it hard to create decent jobs for all, and struggles to find sustainable sources of growth. A share of the population is therefore deemed useless to the interests of capital, and against that population a new form of discrimination is implemented. There are lots of statistics, unfortunately; one example: in Pennsylvania, 60% of inmates are Black, while Black people are 12% of the overall population of the state. Hence the idea of the modern prison as the modern slave ship.
He also draws a parallel with the contemporary period: sugar used to kill Black people on the plantations, because they had to grow it as part of their slave work; today it still kills African Americans in disproportionate ways, through excessive sugar in cheap food and through obesity.
(Slide 38, last line:) Race still organises our social relations, our collective memories and national narratives, and the cities of Europe; within societies it persists as discrimination, prejudice, police brutality, and more.
I told you — this is really rough.