Abstract

Emphasizing the global nature of racism, this volume brings together historians from various regional specializations to explore this phenomenon from comparative and transnational perspectives. The essays shed light on how racial ideologies and practices developed, changed, and spread in Europe, Asia, the Near East, Australia, and Africa, focusing on processes of transfer, exchange, appropriation, and adaptation. To what extent, for example, were racial beliefs of Western origin? Did similar belief systems emerge in non-Western societies independently of Western influence? And how did these societies adopt and adapt Western racial beliefs once they were exposed to them? Up to this point, the few monographs or edited collections that exist only provide students of the history of racism with tentative answers to these questions. More importantly, the authors of these studies tend to ignore transnational processes of exchange and transfer. Yet, as this volume shows, these are crucial to an understanding of the diffusion of racial belief systems around the globe.

Manfred Berg is Curt Engelhorn Professor of American History at the University of Heidelberg. From 1992 to 1997, he was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. From 2003 to 2005, he served as the executive director of the Center for USA-Studies at the Leucorea in Wittenberg. Berg is a specialist in the history of the African American civil rights movement and race relations and has published numerous books and articles on American and international history. His latest titles include Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (Chicago 2011) and Globalizing Lynching History (co-edited with Simon Wendt, Palgrave 2011)

"This volume ranges widely and creatively across time and space not only to investigate the history of racism, but also to interrogate its connections with related but distinct forms of oppression and subjugation. In almost every instance, the essays here reach a very high level—much higher than is typical for volumes of this kind."  ·  Christopher Leslie Brown, Columbia University

Simon Wendt is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Frankfurt. He is the author of The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Gainesville, 2007). He is currently working on a history of the Daughters of the American Revolution.