The Idea of Race

Since the sixteenth century (if not earlier) race has provided one of the most powerful languages for articulating the inequalities that lie at the heart of colonialism. Many scholars have written about when the idea of race was invented, and how its meanings have changed. My work has underscored the importance of food and clothing to these debates. People in early modern Europe believed that lifestyle helped determine what sort of body you had: what you ate and how you dressed had a physical impact on who you were, and how you looked. I explored this most fully in The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America and ‘The Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification and Colonialism’.