Anglophone Discourses on Race in the 19th Century: British and African Perspectives

In 1650, when both the Atlantic and Transatlantic Slave Trade were well underway for two hundred years, there already was an established tradition which tied together the status of a slave and black skin colour (Davidson 1994: 43, 57ff.). The dehumanisation experienced by slaves under colonial slavery was extraordinary as they were perceived and treated like chattel. They were considered inferior and ignoble beings. Their only value was in their manpower – in their role as, according to the biblical verse, “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” (Josuah 9:23) Without any reference to its biblical origin or to the curse on Noah’s grandson Canaan, son of Ham, described at some length in Genesis 9:18‐27, the quoted phrase reappeared time and again in the colonial and travel literature of the 19 th century as a means to legitimate the exploitation of Africans. Its continuous use contributed greatly to habituate the European public to ignore the Africans` humanity – indeed, reifying them by capitalising on them (Hallett 1976, Boahen 1987). The concept of “race” developed in the second half of the 17 th century. With it, the pretence of having found a secular – non‐religious – explanation for human differences in time and space was established (Hund 2006). Together reification and racism were at work in producing a stereotyped image of Euro‐African relations that, at the same time, allowed for both degrading the African (‘heathen’ and ‘black’) and upgrading the European (‘Christian’ and ‘white’). Modern slavery was largely intensified after 1650 when the so‐called “plantation complex” got systematized (Curtin 1998) and the demand for African slaves in the Americas and the Caribbean increased respectively. Henceforth both the exploitative rationality and inhuman cruelty of colonial slavery became harder to ignore (Cooper 2001: 27ff.) Since the 18 th century, enlightened philosophers frequently discussed the issue of slavery and the slave trade. Toward the end of that century a transnational pressure movement intent to end the slave trade came into