The Forging of Races Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000

This book revolutionises our understanding of race. Building upon the insight that races are products of culture rather than biology, Colin Kidd demonstrates that the Bible - the key text in Western culture - has left a vivid imprint on modern racial theories and prejudices. Fixing his attention on the changing relationship between race and theology in the Protestant Atlantic world between 1600 and 2000 Kidd shows that, while the Bible itself is colour-blind, its interpreters have imported racial significance into the scriptures. Kidd's study probes the theological anxieties which lurked behind the confident facade of of white racial supremacy in the age of empire and race slavery, as well as the ways in which racialist ideas left their mark upon new forms of religiosity. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the histories of race or religion.

1. Prologue: race in the eye of the beholder; 2. Introduction: race as scripture problem; 3. Race and religious orthodoxy in the early modern era; 4. Race, the Enlightenment and the authority of scripture; 5. Monogenesis, slavery and the nineteenth-century crisis of faith; 6. The Aryan moment: racializing religion in the nineteenth century; 7. Forms of racialized religion; 8. Black counter-theologies; 9. Conclusion.

This book explores the way in which religious ideas have shaped British and American thinking about race between 1600 and 2000. It shows that the Bible has been just as influential as science over the last few centuries in forging racial attitudes and identities.

Colin Kidd is Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He has previously written Subverting Scotland's Past (1993) and British Identities before Nationalism (1999).