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The Victorians believed the white race was more advanced than others. This 1854 diagram supposedly showed how skull shapes had evolved to the ideal European one (copied from a Greek sculpture). The implication was that other races were more primitive and less advanced.

Paul Broca (1824–1880), the Frenchman who began the first Society of Anthropology, said white people were the furthest from the apes and superior to all other races. And the English writer Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) wrote a poem called “The White Man’s Burden” about having to civilize colonial people who were “half-devil and half-child.” From the beginning of history, this feeling of superiority over other types of people has encouraged more powerful groups to conquer less-advantaged ones. Strangers were almost always feared and disliked. The word “barbarian” is a word that is now used to mean a sav- age, but it was an ancient Greek word for a foreigner. The Romans ruled tribes in Britain, and nearly 2,000 years later, the British ruled tribes in Africa and were one of the European nations that developed the slave trade there.

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The Concept of Race