Much of the work on the origins of whiteness that has been produced in the last few decades has focused on the British empire and the United States. In The Invention of the White Race, for example, Theodore Allen argues that it was only towards the end of the seventeenth century that the concept of whiteness emerged in the English colony of Virginia — specifically as a way to undermine the solidarity between indentured Europeans and enslaved Africans. He identifies a law banning interracial marriage in the colony in 1691 as the decisive moment in the story.
This focus on the British Empire and the United States has tended to give the impression that whiteness was an Anglo-American invention. In fact, as I have discovered in discussions that I’ve had about my book Eurowhiteness since it came out in 2023, some even seem to imagine that the idea of whiteness was not operative in the continental European context — that is, in the Dutch, French, Spanish and Portuguese empires. In reality, of course, it was – just think of the categories grand blanc and petit blanc that were used in French colonies in the Caribbean. In fact, the idea of whiteness already existed elsewhere before it was taken up by English colonists in North America.
Colour Before Whiteness
It is clear that, long before Europeans were imagined as white, sub-Saharan Africans were being described as black — in fact this colour coding seems to go back to classical antiquity and certainly existed in the Arabic-speaking world in the medieval period, where there was extensive enslavement of sub-Saharan people. In any case, by the time the Portuguese were making expeditions along the west coast of Africa in the early fifteenth century, and shortly afterwards began transporting enslaved Africans back to the Iberian peninsula, they were describing sub-Saharan Africans as negros.
However, in the accounts we have of these Portuguese expeditions, others are also described as white by way of contrast with the sub-Saharan Africans. For example, in his Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, the royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara famously recounts the arrival of 235 captives from northern Mauritania in Lagos on the southwest point of the Algarve in 1444. He describes some of them (probably Berbers) as “reasonably white” (”de razoada brancura”) and others (probably sub-Saharan Africans who had already been enslaved by the Berbers) as “black as Ethiopians” (”negros como tipios”).
The Spanish were also using the language of colour in the Americas long before the eighteenth century. There are even several references to the colour of people in the accounts of Columbus’s voyages. In the letter on his first voyage written in 1493, he says the inhabitants of Hispaniola are not “negroes as in Guinea” (”negros como en Guinea”). In the digest of Columbus’s logbook produced by Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Dominican priest known for his condemnation of the treatment of Native Americans in the Spanish empire in South America, the inhabitants of the Bahamas are described as “neither black nor white”. In 1516, de Las Casas himself proposed to bring “white and black slaves” to the continent as an alternative source of manpower.
From the Iberian Empires to the North
Thus it seems that the Dutch, British and French, who gradually displaced the Spanish as the dominant powers in the Caribbean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and also began to bring enslaved Africans to North America, inherited the language of black and white from the Portuguese and Spanish. For example, the Dominican friar Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre’s description of life in the French Antilles in the mid-seventeenth century, according to Robin Blackburn “the most vivid and detailed account available for any European colony in the seventeenth century”, refers to both black and white people.
Was It Already a Racial Hierarchy?
It might be argued that, even if people were already being classified as black and white in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it is not possible to speak of whiteness as such if there was not yet a sense of racial hierarchy. Yet clearly such a hierarchy already existed. For example, in his account of the arrival of those captives in 1444, Zurara describes the “reasonably white” Berbers as being “handsome and genteel” and the sub-Saharan Africans as being “so deformed both of face and body that it seemed to those who guarded them that they were gazing upon images of the lowest hemisphere”.
A second objection might be that, even if the terms black and white were being used, and in a hierarchical way, it did not yet have any real impact. After all, the date that Allen gives for the origin of whiteness, 1691, is when it was first codified in Virginia. Yet we can also point to official documents that included the language of colour in the Portuguese context much earlier than this. For example, Romanus Pontifex, the papal bull issued in 1455 in which the Church granted Portugal permission to acquire slaves from Africa, referred to the enslavement of negroes (nigri in the original Latin).
Why a Better History Matters
What these examples of the use of the language of colour in the Portuguese and Spanish contexts illustrate is that we need a better history of the emergence of whiteness in continental Europe and its colonies. As far as I am aware, there is no book comparable to Allen’s about the emergence of whiteness in Dutch, French, Portuguese or Spanish contexts. This matters not just in terms of the timeline — that is, the question of when and where the idea of whiteness emerged. It is also that, in these other contexts, whiteness may have functioned in importantly different ways than in the British and American contexts.
For example, some of the accounts we have of the evolution of the idea of whiteness in the context of the United States, such as Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People, suggest that it began with a kind of WASP core — that is, it was a category that initially only included Anglo-Saxon protestants and was only gradually enlarged to include others like Catholics of Italian and Irish origin. But the internal hierarchy within whiteness could not have functioned in quite this way — that is, with Catholics relegated to a second-class status — in a Catholic country like France. The Portuguese and Spanish idea of casta, which emerged in the context of the Reconquista, was also distinctive.
Scholars like Hazel Carby have criticised the tendency to see the history of African-Americans as separate from that of the descendants of enslaved people from Africa elsewhere in the Americas, even the British colonies in the Caribbean. The related history of the emergence of whiteness in North America is similarly disconnected from the wider story of its emergence elsewhere. As part of a wider integration of the history of the United States with that of the Americas in general, we need to integrate the history of whiteness in continental Europe and its colonies with that in the British empire and the United States.
Hans Kundnani is a writer and scholar of Europe, race, and foreign policy, and a Senior Fellow at the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Hurst, 2023), The Paradox of German Power (2014), and Utopia or Auschwitz (2009). A visiting professor in practice at the London School of Economics, he writes a column for the New Statesman and contributes to Foreign Affairs, Dissent, and the Times Literary Supplement.
This article first appeared on the Substack of Futures of Difference.
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