A new open-access book, Blumenbach’s Racial Classification: Deconstructing the Timeless Call for Human Differentiation, published by Springer, addresses these questions. This comprehensive study explores how Enlightenment-era ideas of human differentiation were adapted across diverse historical and socio-political contexts, thereby shaping the foundations of racial thinking.
Our colleague Dr. Malin S. Wilckens, a researcher at the IEG, contributed to this edited volume. In her chapter, she examines the dissemination and transformation of Blumenbach’s classification within nineteenth-century polygenetic US ethnology and French anthropology.
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