The aim of this learned and thoughtful work is to describe and analyze the manner in which Western Europeans, mostly British and French authors, saw and interpreted the difference between themselves and natives of the New World and India. Vanita Seth's broader and more ambitious goal is to determine how and when Europeans developed concepts that can be properly described as racist. Her firm and unambiguous conclusion is that this could not and did not happen before the nineteenth century. The ambitious claims that Seth advances are limited by the lack here of any references in languages other than English, in a book devoted to European literature, notably French and German, across more than four centuries. However, this does not affect my admiration for the intense and sustained thinking represented by the book. This review will address two issues: the analysis of Greek and Roman literature in chapter 1, and the conceptual basis of Seth's approach to racism in the book.

The discussion of Greco-Roman antiquity is inadequate for various reasons. Out of all Greek and Latin literature, Herodotus is the only text discussed and interpreted, as if that fifth-century BCE writer were representative of the ancient world in general. Yet Herodotus is only one of numerous Greek and Roman ethnographic authors who were read widely in antiquity and in later periods. The focus on Herodotus is misleading also when considering the Greeks alone, for Herodotus is atypical in his approach to foreigners. Although his subject is a major war between the Greeks and Persia, the opposition West-East is largely absent from his work, as are most striking forms of chauvinism. Yet both definitely existed in other, later Greek authors, even if a West-East opposition never was the primary or dominant Greek perspective on other peoples, and other contrasting of parts of humanity prevailed in Greek and Roman thinking. Both Greeks and Romans clearly and without reservation thought in terms of an opposition between themselves and others, though Herodotus did so far less than many other authors, who Seth does not mention. The opposition is not so much physical, focused on “the body,” but is rather a combination of language, history, culture, and religion, not necessarily in that order. Seth is wrong to claim, as she does, that, “For the ancient Greeks, the eclectic forms of worship observed by their neighbors were less a signifier of barbarism than the fact that they did not speak Greek. It was language, not religion that was constitutive of difference” (p. 29). Language was important, but other factors were no less significant, with the emphases shifting over the centuries.

To focus on West versus non-West is partly a modern idea. It existed in Greek and Roman thinking, but there is far more to say about the opposition between “us and them” than there is about only East-West, or Europe versus non-Europe. Both Greeks and Romans regarded themselves as situated in the middle, at the center of the world, and the foreigners were thought of as living in concentric circles around them. The key to their understanding of differences between peoples was environment. This is hardly mentioned by Seth even though it is central in Western thought until well into the nineteenth century.

Seth states, “It is difficult to argue that power mediated the relations between the Greeks and barbarians” (22). But, on the contrary, the Greeks, followed by the Romans, developed an ideology in which imperialism, the right to rule other peoples, is based on power and superiority. This lies at the heart of Alexander's military adventures and should be obvious to anyone who has read Isocrates and Aristotle, though the idea is absent in Herodotus.

To Seth, the assumption that racism existed in pre-modern times “risks imposing a particularly modern form of reasoning to bear on pre-modern and early-modern tradition.” I would argue that Seth restricts and delimits racism in such narrow terms that it could arise only in the nineteenth century. Her definition excludes many essential and dominant manifestations of racism even in modern times. In other words: the adoption of a narrow definition dictates the outcome in a lopsided fashion. Racism, Seth argues, is “an epistemological edifice that both recognized the body as an object and represented that object as an immutable, passive object that transformed it into a site of discourse and accorded it significance it hitherto lacked” (174). I prefer a broader definition: “an attitude towards individuals and groups of peoples which posits a direct and linear connection between physical and mental qualities, and which attributes to those individuals and groups of peoples collective traits, physical, mental, and moral, that are constant and unalterable by human will, because they are caused by hereditary factors or external influences like climate or geography.” An insistence on a highly specific way of thinking about physical differences excludes essential forms of racism in modern times. It would mean that Nazi hatred of the Jews was not racism—which they themselves claimed it to be—because Jews are physically indistinguishable from their non-Jewish neighbors.

Seth analyzes European attitudes toward the inhabitants of the New World and India, a fascinating subject indeed. Yet the fiercest manifestations of European racism did not focus on distant peoples and the colonies, but on nearby neighbors: the Jews or gypsies in Europe, blacks in the United States. Racism is always irrational, and it can therefore be aimed at imagined physical differences and at imagined characteristics of actual differences. European versus non-European and West versus East are not the only ways of constructing an opposition between self and other. In The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2004), I argued that premodern forms of racism were engendered by premodern concepts and that environmental determinism, like biological determinism, was a mechanism whereby collective prejudices were rationalized. It served to explain long-term stereotypes. Seth instead regards environmentally constructed ideas of difference as of secondary importance because only biological determinism is true racism.

Still, on page 206 of her engaging work Seth concedes that discussions about race were not altogether absent in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. “Race” had an ambiguous status, viewed with ambivalence. Referring to the lists of peoples encountered in writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she claims it is significant that these lists do not mention physical differences. I would claim that it is unimportant whether the literature mentions Africa, Europe, and Asia instead of Negroid, Caucasian, and Mongoloid. Everybody who read those texts was familiar with the common stereotypes regarding Africans, Europeans, and Asiatics. No less important: even if the insistence was not as strictly on physical features in environmental determinism as in its later biological form, the overall outlook was racist according to the broader definition offered above.

An ancient source speaks for itself when it describes the Huns as “this savage race, which dwelt at first in the swamps—a stunted, hideous and puny tribe, scarcely human, unrecognizable by any language save something which bore only slight resemblance to human speech” (Jordanes, Getae, 122).