Chapter One Climate to Crania: science and the racialization of human difference

In letters written to a friend in 1790 and 1791, the young, German-trained French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) took vigorous humanist exception to recent 'stupid' German claims about the supposedly innate deficiencies of 'the negro'.1 It was 'ridiculous', he expostulated, to explain the 'intellectual faculties' in terms of differences in the anatomy of the brain and the nerves; and it was immoral to justify slavery on the grounds that Negroes were 'less intelligent' when their 'imbecility' was likely to be due to 'lack of civilization and we have given them our vices'. Cuvier's judgment drew heavily on personal experience: his own African servant was 'intelligent', freedom-loving, disciplined, literate, 'never drunk', and always good-humoured. Skin colour, he argued, was a product of relative exposure to sunlight.2 A decade later, however, Cuvier (1978:173-4) was 'no longer in doubt' that the 'races of the human species' were characterized by systematic anatomical differences which probably determined their 'moral and intellectual faculties'; moreover, 'experience' seemed to confirm the racial nexus between mental 'perfection' and physical 'beauty'.