Zurara, and the Invention of Race

The sentence above is one of the most consequential in European literature, and almost nobody has read it. It comes from the Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, written in 1453 by the royal chronicler of Portugal, at the commission of the king, to celebrate the achievements of Prince Henry, the man Anglophone schoolbooks call Henry the Navigator.

Zurara is describing the first large auction of African captives in Europe. He sorts them by appearance. He weeps at the scene he is describing (he says so), and then explains that the whole business is providential, because these people are being brought to salvation. And he notes that Prince Henry, who took forty-six of the captives as his fifth share, was present on horseback, and that Henry's satisfaction lay not in the profit but in the souls.

This chapter argues, following the historiography, that race was not the cause of the Atlantic slave trade. It was the instrument built to operate it, and that once built, it outlived the trade and became the organising principle of a global caste system that is still running.

The order of events

The intuitive story is: Europeans believed Africans were inferior, therefore they enslaved them. The historical order is closer to the reverse.

Slavery in the ancient and medieval Mediterranean was not colour-coded. Romans enslaved Britons, Gauls, Greeks, Dacians and Syrians. The English word slave derives from Slav, because of the medieval trade in captives from eastern Europe. Muslim and Christian societies enslaved each other's captives across the Mediterranean for centuries on grounds of religion, not complexion, and religion had a crucial property: it was convertible. A converted captive posed an awkward question, and the awkwardness was real enough that Christian law and custom repeatedly had to address it.

What changed in the fifteenth century was the arrival of a permanent, industrial-scale source of captives from a single region, and, shortly afterwards, of American plantations with an unlimited appetite for labour. The system needed a category that was not convertible: that baptism could not dissolve, that manumission of an individual could not disturb, and that would pass automatically to children. Religion could not do that job. Something else had to be built.

Zurara is the first extended European text in which that something else is visibly under construction: a hierarchy of human beings by complexion, offered as the justification for what has just been done to them.¹

The blessing

The Portuguese Crown did not proceed on its own authority. It asked for, and received, explicit papal warrant.

• Dum Diversas (1452), Nicholas V to Afonso V of Portugal: authority to invade, conquer, subdue and subjugate Saracens, pagans and other unbelievers, to seize their goods and territories, and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.
• Romanus Pontifex (1455), the same pope, confirming and extending the grant, and giving Portugal a monopoly of the African trade.
• Inter Caetera (1493), Alexander VI, dividing the newly encountered world between Spain and Portugal.

These documents are the foundation of what became known in law as the Doctrine of Discovery. That is not a rhetorical claim: the doctrine entered United States jurisprudence through Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823), which held that discovery gave title to the discovering European sovereign and reduced Indigenous nations to occupants, and that decision has been cited in American courts into the twenty-first century.² In March 2023, after decades of pressure from Indigenous organisations, the Vatican issued a statement repudiating the doctrine, which is an acknowledgement that it had been a doctrine.

It is fair to note that the record contains counter-currents. Paul III's Sublimis Deus (1537) declared that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were rational beings not to be enslaved or deprived of property. It was resisted by the Spanish Crown, effectively neutralised in the colonies, and did not touch Africans. The pattern (a moral declaration at the centre, ignored at the point of extraction) will recur in every chapter of this chronicle.

Race becomes law

Ideas do not run a plantation economy. Statutes do. The most precise evidence that race was engineered rather than inherited is the sequence of colonial laws that built it, one problem at a time. Virginia is the clearest case.

Historians have long noted that the hardening accelerates after Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, in which English indentured servants and enslaved Africans rebelled together and burned Jamestown. Edmund Morgan's argument (that the Virginia elite responded by giving poor whites legal privileges precisely to detach them from a common cause with Black labourers) remains the standard account of how "whiteness" was manufactured as a cross-class coalition.³ Theodore Allen pushed it further: whiteness was not a folk identity but a ruling-class instrument of social control, and it worked.

Then the science arrives, afterwards

The chronology of "race science" is the strongest single piece of evidence for this chapter's thesis. The taxonomies arrive after the trade is running at scale, and they intensify exactly when the trade comes under attack.

• 1735. Linnaeus's Systema Naturae divides Homo sapiens into four varieties and assigns each a temperament and a mode of government: Europeans governed by law, Africans by caprice. This is not observation; it is a moral ranking in the format of a botanical key.
• 1795. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach proposes five races and coins "Caucasian" for Europeans, on the stated grounds that a skull in his collection from the Caucasus was the most beautiful he owned, and that the region was a plausible origin. A category still printed on official forms today originated in one German anatomist's aesthetic preference about one skull.⁴
• 1839–1854. Samuel Morton measures cranial capacity and reports a ranking; Nott and Gliddon's Types of Mankind (1854) argues for polygenism (separate creations for separate races), and sells briskly in the American South a few years before the Civil War. Louis Agassiz, the most eminent naturalist in America, endorsed it.

Note the timing on that last cluster. Abolitionism is winning arguments in the 1830s and 1840s; the Enlightenment has made universal human equality a respectable premise; and it is at exactly that moment that the most elaborate, most technical, most confident scientific racism appears. The ideology became most rigorous when the practice became hardest to defend.

What it became

Slavery ended. The category did not, because by then it had other work to do.

It structured the partition of Africa (chapter 10) and the mandates that followed, in which "civilised" nations administered peoples deemed not yet able to stand alone, the actual language of Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, and the legal instrument under which Belgium would rule Rwanda. It structured immigration law, in the United States and across the Anglophone settler world. It structured the differential valuation of human life that let the same governments describe some deaths as tragedies and others as regrettable statistics, a distinction this chronicle will meet again, precisely, in April 1994.

W. E. B. Du Bois named the twentieth century's organising problem as the colour line, and meant it globally, not domestically. Cedric Robinson's term racial capitalism makes the structural claim: the system did not acquire racism as a regrettable add-on, it developed through racial differentiation, because differentiated labour is cheaper labour.⁶

And it is still measurable: in who is permitted to move across borders, in whose debts are forgiven and whose are enforced, in whose resources are extracted at prices set elsewhere, and in the fact that a European country's per-capita emissions can be many times an African country's while the consequences are experienced in inverse proportion. Chapters 16 through 21 take that apart.

One court chronicler, one commissioned justification, one auction on a Portuguese beach in August 1444. Not the beginning of human cruelty (chapter 1 disposed of that idea) but the beginning of the specific machine that this chronicle exists to describe.

Footnotes

1. Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Crónica dos feitos notáveis que se passaram na conquista de Guiné (1453), ch. XXV; English in The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, trans. C. R. Beazley and E. Prestage (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896). Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning (New York: Nation Books, 2016), opens with this passage and makes the case for its priority. ↩
2. Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823); Robert J. Miller et al., Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). ↩
3. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1975); Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols. (London: Verso, 1994–97); Barbara J. Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review I/181 (1990), pp. 95–118. ↩
4. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, De generis humani varietate nativa, 3rd ed. (1795). On Morton and the long fight over his data: Stephen Jay Gould's charge of unconscious bias in The Mismeasure of Man (1981), the 2011 remeasurement by Lewis et al. that largely exonerated his arithmetic, and the subsequent critiques showing that his sampling and framing did the ideological work: see Michael Weisberg, "Remeasuring Man," Evolution & Development 16:3 (2014), pp. 166–178. ↩
5. James H. Sweet, "The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought," William and Mary Quarterly 54:1 (1997), pp. 143–166; Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). ↩
6. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and "The African Roots of War," Atlantic Monthly (1915); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed, 1983); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), whose thesis on the economic origins of abolition is still argued over and still indispensable. ↩