Racism and state formation in the age of absolutism

What is it about?

This essay maps how racism emerges as a material force amid the formation and dissolution of absolutist states in Western Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Elite political cultures of Western European societies were therefore already suffused with the logic of racialisation prior to the colonisation of the Americas.

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Why is it important?

The article renders transparent hitherto occluded connections between histories focusing on the internal racialisation of Europe and the racialisation of the European exterior. And in doing so, it establishes the constitutive part racism played in the emergence of capitalist modernity