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By Root 2948 0

couldn’t find a consistent way to use historically accurate terminology. Instead, I refer to people geographically, by their place of origin, using modern terms. Thus I call the conqueror of the Philippines, Miguel López de Legazpi, a Spaniard, even though he was Basque, led an expedition composed mainly of Basques, and presumably spoke Basque at home. When the regional origin becomes important, as in my discussion of the Basque-Vicuña war in Potosí, I use more local geographic names. This scheme courts anachronism, though I have tried to avoid it. Because the United Kingdom of Great Britain didn’t exist until Scotland and England merged in 1707, for instance, I don’t call anyone before that date from these countries “British.” At the same time, I also don’t ever label anyone from Ireland as a Briton, even though Ireland was formally part of the United Kingdom between 1800 and 1921—it’s too confusing. I am sure that I have made mistakes; readers who wish to tell me about them can contact me at charlesmann.org.

Despite its problems, this scheme has the virtue of allowing me to avoid another intractable issue: race. Race is part of any discussion today of the interactions of people of European, African, Asian, and Indian descent. But at the dawn of globalization modern concepts of race didn’t exist. Fighting off the yoke of African Islamic empires, the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula didn’t, as a rule, kill or enslave “blacks,” they killed and enslaved “Moors” or “infidels” or “idolaters.” At the beginning, slavery had little racial baggage; the question that preoccupied Spaniards was not whether “black” or “red” people could be enslaved but whether Christians could be put in bondage; heathens, heretics, and criminals of any color were fair game.

The term negro, a Portuguese word for “black,” didn’t come into wide use until the 1450s, when Portuguese ships came to what is now Senegal and dubbed it the terra dos negros (land of the blacks). Although “negro” referred to skin color, it was mostly an ethnic descriptor, much like “Irish” or “Malay.” An analogy might be ang mo, the Fujianese word for “redhead.” Ang mo was used to label the Dutch, even though most didn’t have red hair. Later negro came to mean “slave,” and was used by Africans themselves. As the historians Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton have noted, Central Africans insisted that European visitors use one Portuguese word for black (negro) to describe slaves and a second, alternative Portuguese word for black (preto) to describe free Africans.

From the beginning, Europeans had terrible things to say about “blacks,” but the disdain wasn’t as monolithic as sometimes portrayed, and hard to distinguish from the garden-variety ethnocentrism that seems to be an ineradicable part of the human condition. More important, the negative beliefs weren’t racial in the modern sense—they didn’t invoke an inheritable genetic makeup. Europeans criticized African behavior, not African racial stock; Africans were bad because they were supposedly “promiscuous,” “thievish,” or engaged in “devil worship,” not because they were physically or mentally inferior. (I am oversimplifying a little: Europeans also believed that parents who engaged in harmful practices like devil worship would pass on a terrible moral stain to their children, who would grow up to be physically and mentally inferior. But this is still quite different from the modern conception of race.)

Races in the contemporary sense of heritable genetic patterns associated with geographic origin certainly exist, though actually identifying which genes make someone “African” or “Caucasian” remains a tall order. Are men and women “black” if they have very dark complexions and broad noses, but their hair is not twisted into corkscrew curls? Are they “white” if they have aquiline noses and flat hair but dark complexions? The complications are endless, and nobody has come close to resolving them. They are also beside the point: this type of scientific description is not what eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theorists