Colonialism and Enlightenment : The Legacy of German Race Theories

For the last 30 years, scholars have treated Enlightenment race theory and nineteenth-century German colonialism as two distinct events.In Colonialism and Enlightenment, editors Bettina Brandt and Daniel L.Purdy present perspectives from scholars across the fields of philosophy, postcolonialism, literature, and German and African American studies, who challenge this view, providing a critical examination of the historical connection between "scientific" racial theory in late-Enlightenment Germany and the forces of colonialism and Nazism over a hundred years later. From its first formulations in the eighteenth century and well into the twentieth century, German race theory was implicated in colonialism.Philosophers and biologists drew their arguments about race from information that was generated by the slave trade and plantation economies in the Americas.Their reliance on colonial data was applied to so-called "internal colonization" within Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as t