Towards Races: Ambivalent Encounters in the South Seas

Abstract

In 1697, Leibniz (1718:36–8) speculated about ‘the languages and the origins’ of the central and northern Asian ‘peoples’ of Tartary and wondered whether some might not comprise ‘a single people’. He had ‘somewhere’ read that ‘a certain voyager had divided men into certain tribes, races, or classes’. He was alluding to an anonymous article attributed to the philosopher–physician Bernier (1684), given foundational status as the first published use of the modern sense of the term race and the earliest taxonomy of human races.¹ Because Bernier had travelled widely and lived in Asia, his work was authorized by personal observation and experience.² But he was also a respected savant, a protégé and interpreter (1678) of the empiricist philosopher Pierre Gassendi and a friend of John Locke. The article (1684:133–5, 138) recommends replacing the venerable geographical partition of the globe with a ‘new division’ into ‘four or five Species [Especes] or Races of men’, ‘notable’ for their ‘difference’. It speculates that the ‘blackness’ of ‘the Africans’ must be ‘essential’ rather than an ‘accidental’ result of exposure to the heat of the sun and seeks the cause ‘in the particular constitution [contexture] of their body’, or ‘in the blood’, or in ‘the seed [semence] which is particular to certain races or species’.