Empire, Race, and Gender: The Ancient Origins of White Supremacy and Patriarchy

This article argues that racism did not originate with the modern invention of race but crystallized out of a much older imperial grammar that had already learned how to naturalize domination through embodied difference. Long before race emerged as a named category, ancient and medieval empires developed durable ways of converting historically produced hierarchies into features of nature, the cosmos, and divine order. Through a comparative genealogy spanning early Mesopotamian epic, Near Eastern imperial inscriptions, Egyptian visual regimes, Greek philosophy and historiography, biblical scripture, South Asian metaphysics, late antique encyclopedism, and medieval Marian devotion, the article shows how inequality was repeatedly anchored in the body, in genealogy, in geography, and in moral psychology. Across these traditions, political authority is consistently masculinized, while subordination is feminized, animalized, or rendered reproductively vulnerable. Patriarchy and racialization thus emerge as co-constitutive imperial technologies rather than as separate or sequential phenomena. Modern racism did not invent hierarchy; it rendered an ancient logic portable, inheritable, and globally scalable by fastening domination to visible human difference. By situating race within a longue durée history of empire and male domination, the article reframes contemporary debates on racism as questions of imperial continuity rather than modern deviation.