Wonderful, thought provoking scholarship. Not easy reading, exactly. After all, this is sociology, ethnology, intellectual history, anthropology, etc. But Painter has delineated concepts so carefully and written so gracefully and clearly that The History of White People is quite accessible. It is a good, "expand-your-mind" kind of read.
According to Dr. Painter, in the ancient world there was no concept of race. Skin color indicated nothing about a person's worth. After all, the classical and known world around the Mediterranean, down the Nile and through Persia to India included every shade of skin color. What mattered much more was a person's geographical origins...and whether they were victors or vanquished; barbarians or Roman....
Early anthropologists Herodotus and Julius Caesar, among others, commented extensively on the strange, primitive warlike peoples on the fringe of the known world, inhabiting the dark forests beyond the Alps and of the need to extend law and order to them. By the 18th century, these "tribes" of Central and Northern Europe, having "discovered" and claimed vast areas of the world for themselves, began the task of determining the basis of their presumed "superior" civilization and development. They were looking for a scientific explanation which would distinguish among and categorize the peoples of the earth, including among the Europeans themselves. So began a process of conceptualizing a white race, and seeking the identifying hallmarks (skull size was important) so these races could be placed in a “natural” hierarchical order. Linneaus, Madame de Stahl, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson were just a few of the luminaries who shaped the discussion for two hundred years...and ingrained the concept into our social discourse - especially in Northern Europe and the United States, with stunning, unforeseen, consequences.