At the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, most Europeans grouped Africans into the despised categories of pagan heathens and Muslim infidels. Africans were certainly not the only peoples subject to such dehumanizing attitudes. Jews were also viewed as alien people who, like Africans, were naturally sinful and depraved. More generally, elite Europeans were accustomed to viewing the peasant masses as a lower form of humanity.10

As Europeans turned to Africa for new sources of slaves, they drew on and developed ideas about Africans’ primitiveness and barbarity to defend slavery and even argue that enslavement benefited Africans by bringing the light of Christianity to heathen peoples. Over time, the institution of slavery fostered a new level of racial inequality. In contrast to peasants and Jews, Africans gradually became seen as utterly distinct from and wholly inferior to Europeans. Black skin became equated with slavery itself as Europeans at home and in the colonies convinced themselves that blacks were destined by God to serve them as slaves in perpetuity.

After 1700, the emergence of new methods of observing and describing nature led to the use of science to define race. Although the term originally referred to a nation or an ethnic group, henceforth “race” would mean biologically distinct groups of people, whose physical differences produced differences in culture, character, and intelligence.