As English power grew in the New World, fuelled at first by sugar plantations worked by African slaves in Barbados and Jamaica, the theological justification for racism was steadily replaced with secular ideologies. The claims of Christendom began to give way to the claims of Europe. The insistence on a unique descent from Ancient Greece and Rome became central to the ideology that presented Europe as set apart from the rest of the world – as the original home of truth, justice and beauty. In time it would become an explicitly racial claim ascribing classical Greek civilization to ‘Aryan’ migration from the North. It was what Romila Thapar has called “historical memory without history”.
All kinds of chauvinisms and lines of exclusion and domination marked the ancient Mediterranean. But the distinctions between people imagined as civilized and barbarian, between colonisers and the colonised and masters and slaves, were not tied to modern ideas of race. There were, in modern terms, white slaves and black intellectuals, artists, merchants and religious, military and political leaders.
The English word slave – and its equivalents in other Germanic as well as Romance languages – comes from the word Slav, a term used to describe people in what is now Eastern Europe. It first appeared in Byzantine Greek in around 800. It would be more than 800 years before slavery was tied to a recognisably modern idea of race, to ideas of whiteness and blackness.
Neither the Greek nor the Roman empires imagined themselves as European projects. Europe was the name of a place, not a political project or a certain kind of people. Ancient Greece and Rome were far more entangled with parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East than parts of Europe. This entanglement generated the primary spatial basis for the networks through which ideas and technologies were exchanged. It would have been more likely for a person from what is now Egypt, Turkey or Syria to have standing in these empires than someone from what is now, say, Norway or Poland. From Alexander the Great to Julian, the last pagan Emperor of Rome, the drive to conquer was never articulated to anything like the modern conception of race. Culture, not biology, was the primary mark of exclusion and that exclusion was not always absolute – empire offered possibilities for various kinds of routes into inclusion.
The great thinkers of Greek antiquity were well aware that their civilisation came after that of Mesopotamia and Egypt. There were well-established links to Phoenicia and Egypt. Figures like Herodotus and Pythagoras were thought to have visited Egypt. Aristotle’s teacher, Eudoxos of Knidos, had studied in Egypt. Aristotle was, Martin Bernal writes, “clearly fascinated with the country”. In the 330s, when Alexander III of Macedon, who had been tutored by Aristotle as a boy, conquered Egypt and Persia, and made forays into India, there was a marked escalation in Greek interest in these civilizations – and exchange of various kinds. And the Roman Empire was far from being an isolated or singular civilizational achievement. There were, at the same time, significant empires like the Sasanians in Persia, the Yuezhi (later Kushan) in China and the Guptas in India.
