Nobility and the Making of Race in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Tim Mc Inerney

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9781350346383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Nobility and the Making of Race in Eighteenth-Century Britain focuses on 18th-century Britain and Ireland at a time when race theory as we know it today was steadily emerging in the realm of natural philosophy to examine the structural relationship between nobility and race. This ground-breaking book examines texts from the fields of naturalism, political philosophy, medicine, and colonial venture, as well as interrogating works of drama and literature, in order to track how climate-based understandings of human variety at this time became increasingly imbued with noble traditions of genealogical purity and hierarchies of descent. This process, the book argues, allowed British naturalists and wider society to understand global populations according to an already familiar pattern of genealogical inequality, and offered the proponents of race theory a ready made model of natural supremacy. In this highly original and meticulously researched book, Tim McInerney explains why nobility and race developed in the way they did and how the premise of each promoted a certain idea of superiority. The result is a necessary in-depth understanding of how genealogical exclusivity works as a power strategy, vital to students and scholars alike.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on translations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The noble paradigm
• 3 The race myth in retrospect
• 4 Human hierarchy and the Great Chain of Being
• 5 Civilized anatomies in eighteenth-century human-variety theory
• 6 Superior blood: Horses, ethno-histories and hereditary disease
• 7 Mankind’s new nobility: The rise of genealogical race theory
• 8 Ireland’s imposter aristocrats
• 9 The South Seas: Laboratory of the noble physique
• 10 ‘Royal slaves’: Abolitionism and fantasies of slave nobility
• 11 Noble race in a time of revolution
• 12 Conclusion
• References
• Index
• Copyright