“Race” And It’s Evolution In The Early Modern Atlantic World

As the basic unit for European scholars to classify human groups,"race" reflects the epistemological changes and the reshaping of worldviews in European society since the early modern period.The evolution of the concept of "race" in the early modern Atlantic world reflects the conflict and adjustment between "old philosophy" and "new philosophy".The "Old Philosophy" takes the narrative of the Bible as the core,combines the core elements of classical speculative philosophy such as Aristotelism and Neoplatonism,and constructs the "monogenism" with "human origin from Adam" as the basic essence world theory system.The theologically dominated concept of "race" emphasizes the single origin of human race and the inherent moral and ethical differences between "races".Therefore,under the theoretical system of "Old Philosophy","race" is not only a kind of theological imagination,which gives a logical space for interpretation to the single world view of Christianity."New Philosophy" is devoted to dismantling the "monogenesis" world system constructed by Christian theology.It not only absorbs classical metaphysical theories such as "atomic theory",but also reinterprets the origin of human beings from the perspective of speculative philosophy,thus giving birth to the "previous" Adam Theory” and other human origin theories that emphasize the “multiple origin”.In addition,the colonization of the Americas by European colonists and the academic research of European scholars in the Atlantic world have also injected the methodology of positivism into the theoretical system of the "New Philosophy".On this basis,the differences in external physical aspects such as skin,body shape,and hair texture between races gradually merge with the moral and ethical differences in theological interpretation.The racial classification system and the theory of racial superiority and inferiority emphasized by "scientific racism" have gradually taken shape in the Atlantic world.With the construction of European political order,"scientific racism",as a theoretical pillar of colonial expansion,has increasingly gone beyond the field of scientific research,and eventually receded into a political discourse of colonial rule over people of color by European and American colonial empires.