ONE WILD WORLD — NEWSLETTER

Issue #016  |  This Changed Everything  |  April 2026

If you read the histories of ancient Greece and Rome, you will find slavery on almost every page — but you will not find what we today call racism. The Romans had a Black emperor for eighteen years and barely commented on his skin. The idea that some humans are biologically inferior to others, ranked by colour, did not exist as a system. It had to be invented. We can name the man who wrote the first chapter, the colony that wrote it into law, and the British scientist who turned it into a fake science. This is the story of how an idea was built.

BY THE NUMBERS

The first thing to understand is that the Greeks and Romans were not enlightened pluralists. They were enthusiastic, sometimes vicious, ethnocentrists. They believed they were the centre of the civilised world and called everyone else “barbarians” — a word that originally just meant “people who don’t speak Greek” and gradually became an insult.

But — and this is the part that historians have spent the better part of a century arguing about — their prejudice was not built around skin colour. It was built around culture, language, climate, and the idea of being “free” versus “servile.” A blond Germanic tribesman north of the Alps was a barbarian. A pale-skinned Briton was a barbarian. A dark-skinned Egyptian or Ethiopian could be a Greek-speaking philosopher and was treated with respect. Aristotle had a theory that the “temperate” Mediterranean climate produced the best people; people from too cold or too hot regions, in his view, were inferior. But the inferiority was about where you were born, not what colour you were.

The Roman Empire makes the point even more clearly. In 193 AD, a man called Lucius Septimius Severus became emperor. He was born in Leptis Magna, on the coast of modern-day Libya, into a family that was part Punic (North African) and part Italian. He spoke Latin with a strong African accent. He ruled the Roman Empire for eighteen years, founded a dynasty, expanded the borders into Scotland, and died in York in 211. The contemporary Roman sources are remarkably uninterested in his skin tone. They mock his accent. They write almost nothing about his colour.

This is not to say antiquity was a multicultural utopia. The Tel Aviv historian Benjamin Isaac, in his landmark 2004 book The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, argues that the Greeks and Romans had what he calls “proto-racism” — the rough conceptual building blocks that later thinkers would assemble into the real thing. He is right. There were stereotypes. There was prejudice. There were ugly assumptions about “soft” Asians and “wild” Northerners. But proto-racism is not racism. The classical scholar Frank Snowden put it bluntly: in the ancient world, no organised society made skin colour the basis for judging a person’s worth, rights, or place in the social order. That came later. Much later. And it came for a very specific reason.

In the early 1440s, Portuguese ships under the patronage of Prince Henry the Navigator made the first European voyages directly to sub-Saharan Africa to capture human beings and bring them back as slaves. In 1444, the first major slave auction was held in the Portuguese town of Lagos. Hundreds of West Africans were sold to Portuguese nobles. Prince Henry took his royal cut.

But there was a problem. Slavery itself was not new — medieval Europe had practised it for centuries, mostly using captives from the Black Sea region. (The word “slave” itself comes from “Slav,” because so many of the enslaved had been Eastern European.) What was new was that the supply of Slavic captives was drying up just as the Portuguese were opening a new supply on the African coast. And there was an awkward theological issue: Christians were not supposed to enslave fellow Christians, and a small but growing chorus of churchmen was beginning to question whether Africans — most of whom had never had the chance to convert — should really be lifelong property.

Prince Henry needed an answer. So in 1452 his nephew, King Afonso V, commissioned the royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara to write an official biography of Prince Henry’s African expeditions. Zurara finished the book, The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, in 1453.

This is the crucial sequence. Slave trading came first. The racist idea was invented to justify it. Not the other way around. As Kendi puts it: racist policy produces racist ideas, which produce ignorance and hate — not the other way around. Zurara was not writing about a problem he had observed in nature. He was writing a press release for a prince who had decided to make a fortune in human beings.

Two and a half centuries later, the system Zurara had helped invent was about to be hardened into law in the English colonies of North America — and given a new architecture that would last for centuries.

In 1676, an English colonist named Nathaniel Bacon led an armed uprising against the colonial government of Virginia. What spooked the Virginia elite was not the rebellion itself — it was who had joined it. Bacon’s army included English indentured servants, free Black settlers, and African slaves, all fighting side by side against the wealthy planter class. After Bacon died of disease and the rebellion collapsed, Virginia’s rulers held a private council and made a strategic decision: never again.

Over the next thirty years, Virginia’s legislature passed a series of laws specifically designed to drive a permanent legal wedge between European servants and African slaves. White indentured servants were given new privileges and protections. Africans — who had previously been able, in some cases, to work off their indentures and become free landowners (the case of the free Black Virginian Anthony Johnson is the famous example) — had every avenue to freedom progressively closed. By the 1705 Virginia Slave Codes, the system was complete. Slavery in Virginia was now, for the first time in human history, defined by skin colour and inherited at birth.

The historian Ira Berlin has noted that something else happened during this same period: the word “white” started appearing in Virginia’s official documents and statutes. Before the 1680s, English colonists had called themselves “Christians” or “English” or “freemen.” Now, increasingly, they were called “white.” The category of whiteness — as a legal, political, and social identity — was being invented in real time, in colonial law books, by men who needed a way to bind poor European labourers to wealthy European landowners and prevent another biracial uprising.

By the early 18th century, the racial slavery system was running at industrial scale. Enslaved Africans were being shipped across the Atlantic at a rate of tens of thousands per year. Sugar, tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations in the Americas were producing enormous wealth for European empires. The system needed something more than a Portuguese chronicler’s claim that Africans were “savage.” It needed science.

In 1735, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus published the first edition of Systema Naturae, the founding text of modern biological classification. Linnaeus was the first scientist to formally place humans in the animal kingdom alongside other primates — a genuinely radical move at the time. But he also did something else. He divided the human species into four “varieties,” one for each of the four known continents, and assigned each variety a colour and a temperament.

By the tenth edition of Systema Naturae, published in 1758, Linnaeus had refined his categories. Europeanus was “white, sanguine, muscular,” “gentle, acute, inventive,” and “governed by laws.” Africanus was “black, phlegmatic, relaxed,” “crafty, indolent, negligent,” and “governed by caprice.” He was not just describing physical differences. He was assigning a fixed, hierarchical character to each group. The Linnean Society of London, which still exists, today acknowledges that Linnaeus’s classifications “cemented colonial stereotypes and provided one of the foundations for scientific racism.”

Linnaeus was followed by the German anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1779), who introduced the term “Caucasian” to describe Europeans — invented because Blumenbach thought the most beautiful skull in his collection came from the Caucasus mountains. The American physician Samuel Morton (1839) measured human skulls and falsely concluded that Europeans had larger brains than Africans. The French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau (1853) wrote An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, arguing for permanent Aryan supremacy. By the time Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, the entire intellectual scaffolding of “scientific” racism was already in place.

The man who did the bending was Darwin’s own half-cousin: the English statistician and explorer Sir Francis Galton.

Galton read On the Origin of Species shortly after publication and became convinced that natural selection — the process by which the better-adapted survive and reproduce — could and should be applied to human beings. He was also deeply influenced by his contemporary Herbert Spencer, the philosopher who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” (a phrase Darwin himself never used until much later, and only reluctantly). Spencer applied the language of evolution to society: the rich were rich because they were biologically superior; the poor were poor because they were biologically weaker; helping the disadvantaged was working against nature.

In 1883, Galton coined a new word to describe the project of improving the human race through controlled breeding: eugenics, from the Greek for “well-born.” He proposed that the “fit” should be encouraged to reproduce and the “unfit” should be prevented from doing so. He was thinking in particular about poor Britons, the “feebleminded,” and “inferior” races.

This is the moment racism received its modern industrial uniform. The 1453 chronicle had given racial slavery a moral defence. The 1676 Virginia laws had given it a legal architecture. Linnaeus and his successors had given it a scientific veneer. Galton’s eugenics gave it a political programme — a way for governments to act on it directly.

Galton’s movement found its most enthusiastic audience not in Britain, but in the United States. In 1907, the state of Indiana passed the world’s first compulsory eugenic sterilisation law, allowing the involuntary sterilisation of people deemed “feebleminded,” “degenerate,” criminal, or simply poor. By the 1930s, thirty-three American states had similar laws. In 1927, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Buck v. Bell that compulsory sterilisation of the “unfit” was constitutional. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the majority opinion, ending it with the now-infamous line: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Between 1907 and the 1970s, an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilised under these laws. The victims were disproportionately poor, disproportionately Black, disproportionately Native American, and disproportionately women. California ran the most aggressive programme; Virginia ran the case that made it constitutional.

And then, in the 1930s, a new regime in Germany took notice.

The reason this whole history is worth telling is that it cuts directly against one of the most damaging assumptions in our current culture: the idea that racism is a natural, eternal, inevitable feature of human societies — something baked into us by evolution or instinct or some deep tribal impulse.

It isn’t. We can name the man who wrote the first defence of it (Zurara, 1453). We can date the colonial laws that codified it (Virginia, 1680s–1705). We can identify the scientist who gave it a fake biological framework (Linnaeus, 1735). We can name the cousin of Darwin who turned it into a political programme (Galton, 1883). And we can trace the line from there to forced sterilisation in California, the Nuremberg laws, and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

All of which is to say: racism, as we know it today, is not a natural fact. It is a 600-year-old human invention with specific authors, specific dates, and a specific paper trail. People built it. People wrote it down. People passed laws to enforce it. Which means people — with effort, evidence, and time — can also unbuild it.

An African Roman emperor whose colour barely got mentioned. A 1453 chronicle commissioned to make a slave-trader look holy. A 1676 colonial rebellion that scared Virginia into inventing whiteness. A Swedish botanist with a chart of four “varieties.” A British statistician with a new word for an old idea. And seventy thousand sterilisations later, a regime in Berlin asking America for the legal templates.

Racism is not what humans have always been. It is what some humans, in specific places, at specific times, decided to make us.

SOURCES

Isaac, Benjamin — The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2004)

Snowden, Frank M. — Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Harvard University Press, 1983)

Heng, Geraldine — The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

Kendi, Ibram X. — Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books, 2016) — winner, National Book Award for Nonfiction

Painter, Nell Irvin — The History of White People (W.W. Norton, 2010)

Gould, Stephen Jay — The Mismeasure of Man (W.W. Norton, 1981; revised 1996)

Cohen, Adam — Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (Penguin, 2016)

Lombardo, Paul A. — Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)

The Linnean Society of London — “Homo sapiens: Classifying the Human Animal” (linnean.org)

Eltis, David & Richardson, David — Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2010)

Berlin, Ira — Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Harvard University Press, 1998)