1. THE COLOUR OF MONEY An examination of prevailing attitudes towards human difference in the writings of some of the major philosophers and historians of antiquity, including Herodotous, Aristotle, and Plutarch. The episode also assesses the implications of Old Testament dogmas concerning the pre-destined attributes of the different ‘races’ (specifically, the idea that the major racial groups were supposedly the descendants of Noah’s sons - Ham, Shem and Japheth – and that Black people were victims of ‘The Curse of Ham’). The development of the idea of ‘race’ is traced as a pseudo-biological category throughout the English Tudor period (particularly the literary application of the concept in Shakespeare). Significant changes in ideas about race are identified that coincided with the event that would shape racial ideas for centuries: the Columbian adventure in the ‘New World’ and the subsequent development and institutionalisation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade – an event that led to the dehumanisation, exploitation and inferiorisation of Africans - and the outright extermination of Native Americans. Also shown is how the idea of ‘race’ was understood and expressed in the writings of some of the giants of the European Enlightenment, including the 17th Century British philosopher John Locke (who profited from slavery, and invested in the Royal Africa Company, which traded in slaves); and the 18th Century thinker David Hume, who wrote, “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men [for there are four or five different kinds] to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.” Meanwhile, in continental Europe, French philosopher Montesquieu penned a famous essay attacking slavery, and yet could still say of African slaves: “These creatures are all over black, and with such a flat nose that they can scarcely be pitied. It is hardly to be believed that God, who is a wise Being, should place a soul, especially a good soul, in such a black ugly body”. There are many other examples and from some of the pre-eminent intellectual figures of the age. One of Montesquieu’s contemporaries and compatriots, the writer Georges-Louis Buffon, declared that “Donkeys are degenerate horses; apes degenerate men. The Negro is to man what the donkey is to the horse”, while the hugely influential German thinker Immanuel Kant offered the insight: “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling”. These ideas percolated into the work of those who considered themselves scientists. The Swedish biologist Carolus Linnaeus devised a fourfold categorisation of humanity, consisting of Americanus (who were “stubborn, warlike, and uncivilized”); Asiaticus (“melancholy, severe, conceited and stingy”); Africanus (“cunning, passive, inattentive, impulsive and shameless, too, because of the habit of their women to lactate profusely”); and Europaeus ( who is “changeable, clever, and inventive. He puts on tight clothing. He is governed by laws.”) In the 1790s, the English surgeon Charles White published his Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, a book that attempted to reconcile this ‘natural’ racial hierarchy into the idea of ‘The Chain of Being’ – a notion that conceived of the universe as a divinely-ordered progression from lower life-forms to the creatures occupying the highest plateau of existence: European Man. Towards the end of the 18th Century, the German physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach produced a series of works that supported White’s view. Blumenbach developed the racial categories which came to dominate all discourse on race for almost 200 years. Based on his studies of skulls, he produced a five-sided system which defined white Europeans as ‘Caucasian’; black Africans as ‘Negroid’; East Asians as ‘Mongoloid; and those from the Pacific region ‘Malays’. Blumenbach’s development of this racial taxonomy has encouraged some historians to describe him as ‘The Father of Scientific Racism’. But in this film, we reveal the little-known details of Blumenbach’s Pauline conversion – the major revision of his ideas that took place in later life. In the 1820s, his anatomical studies yielded new results, leading him to conclude that there was at least as much (and possibly even more) human diversity among Africans than between Europeans – and that Africans were not inferior to the rest of humanity after all. Although it is only Blumenbach’s early work that is remembered today, there were a few sources of resistance to Europe’s explicitly racist intellectual consensus. Throughout the 17th and 18th Centuries (an age which we generally associate with the emergence of enlightened, humanistic and progressive thinking), there were very few voices that dis