Science, Race, and Subjects of Empire

(4 Credits)

The idea of race gained scientific traction during the age of European and American imperial expansion. Focusing on the period from roughly 1750 to 1914, this course examines the entanglements between science, race, and empire. We will pay special attention to how new techniques were deployed to identify, classify, and control racialized peoples, to the colonial sites where racial ideologies were constructed, and to how science and race theories were popularized to the public. How did the colonization of the Americas shape European conceptions of race in the early modern period? What role did the slave trade play in medicalizing race? Which new technologies, scientific strategies, and rhetorical devices were used to naturalize human differences in the nineteenth century? Why were humans put on display and photographed? How did archaeology, anthropology, and evolution legitimate the colonial enterprise? What are the present-day legacies of early race science? We will address these questions and many more through a variety of written and visual primary sources, supplemented by postcolonial critiques by historians of science and race.