Semantically, this chapter has traced the crystallization by naturalists and anthropologists of an old genealogical term and an ancient mindset of widely shared European distaste for certain visible human characters into the scientific concept of a race. Initially a concrete denominator for essentialized human groups, it was ultimately systematized as an abstract noun condensing a total theoretical system, as in Knox's aphorism, 'Race is everything', and Blanchard's assertion that 'the instinct of race is innate in man's heart'.^[148]

Discursively, the chapter has investigated a major transition hinged roughly on the passage from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century: the broad shift from the Enlightenment differentiation of universal stages of linear social development in the natural history of man to the hierarchical classification of discrete biological races by the science of race; and the parallel displacement of optimistic scenarios of general human progress by pessimism about the aptness of non-Europeans for civilization or even in some cases for survival. Though the case for discursive hiatus is compelling, it should obscure neither the significant continuities in European attitudes to non-white people over at least five hundred years nor the tenacity with which certain cardinal concepts and dispositions — among which race has been pre-eminent for the past two centuries — can and do metamorphose and recur across ideological spectrums. Moreover, by modern antiracist standards of verbal propriety, my metaphors of movement and transformation may seem irrelevant, with Enlightenment and nineteenth-century writers deemed equally guilty of racism: Buffon, Blumenbach, and Kant have each been portrayed as precursors of Anthropology's ambivalent complicity in the normalization of scientific racism.^[149] Yet the blanket charge of racism is too blunt and anachronistic an instrument for most historians who want to discriminate precisely between discourses, ideologies, vocabularies, and authors and to understand them in contemporary terms. Such a perspective, for example, sharply differentiates Blumenbach's relativism, professed lack of anti-Negro prejudice, and insistence on the 'perfectibility' of 'our black brethren' from the diverse racial fundamentalisms of Cuvier, Lawrence, Knox, Hunt, Broca, or most of the polygenists.^[150]

Intellectually, the chapter has tracked the tortuous trajectories by which climate and crania, environment and heredity, reproduction and morphology were opposed or interwoven as divergent relative emphases in hostile schools of anthropological explanation and were eventually fused in evolutionary theory. The environmentalist monogenism of Buffon, Kant, and Prichard heavily emphasized reproductive criteria. Like them, Blumenbach also attributed human diversity to external stimuli but he only belatedly acknowledged reproduction as a key index of racial variation, in addition to cranial structure. Before 1850, most polygenists denied environmental influences on race formation in favour of a static morphological approach while Broca brought reproduction and morphology together in his work on hybridity and craniology. So too did his transformist disciple Topinard (1879:655) who admitted the 'action of the milieus' on races made unstable by the twin impact of the struggle for existence and crossbreeding. Darwinian synthesis conceived species, races, or 'persistent modifications' as labile products of very long-run adaptations to milieus, transmitted by generation, but remained heavily reliant on morphology and anthropometry. Thus Darwin (1871:231) remarked that the 'form' of every organic being 'depends on an infinitude of complex relations': the 'variations' which have 'arisen' and 'been preserved' in response to 'surrounding physical conditions', to rival 'surrounding organisms', and to 'inheritance from innumerable progenitors' whose forms had resulted from 'equally complex relations'. Huxley (1894:219), the comparative anatomist, insisted on the application of 'purely zoological methods' to man. All these strands ultimately came together in the new science of 'ecology' as conceived by the German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919): the 'whole science of the relationships of the organism to the surrounding external world'.^[151]

Feeding back and forth, to and from common usages, the biological idea of race underwrote the explosion of race pride in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States together with its negative corollary, the steady hardening of prejudice against racial difference. Such pride and prejudices — shared, theorized, and justified by scientists of race — had, by the end of the nineteenth century, become a key component of the ideological underpinning of Euro-American imperialism and the colonial domination it was extending over significant portions of the world.