Race: A Global History seeks to re-conceptualize the political history of race from the Enlightenment to the present day. It proposes a new perspective that aims to re-examine the Western-centred approach to the history of race within a more integrative global framework.
This book does not attempt to reinstate the importance of individual cases in the history of race. What it proposes instead is to unearth traditions of racial thought which, while originating from the general European debate about human difference during the 17th and 18th centuries, nevertheless remained alive throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, only to re-emerge in explicit form in current populist, xenophobic and anti-immigration movements.