William Petty's Anthropology: Religion, Colonialism, and the Problem of Human Diversity (2011)
Lewis, Rhodri (Author)
Huntington Library Quarterly
Volume: 74
Pages: 261--288
Publication date: 2011
Language: English
In the late 1670s, William Petty wrote Of the Scale of Creatures, an unfinished treatise that reinterprets the scala naturae or chain of being. On the strength of its appendix on human anthropology, Petty has been identified as a founding father of modern racism. By reconsidering the history of the work's dissemination and examining the language and assumptions of the Scale as a whole, Rhodri Lewis challenges this reading. This essay shows that the Scale was virtually unknown until the twentieth century, and that it offers what was then a conventional geo-humoral explanation of human diversity, one quite distinct from modern racialism. It was motivated primarily by Petty's theological concerns and his desire to vindicate the scriptural account of the origins and demographic growth of humankind.
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