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.

The 19th Century use of racial categories as credible scientific concepts is the main focus of this episode, which covers the French aristocrat Count Arthur de Gobineau’s considerable contribution to the history racist ideas.

The British social theorist Herbert Spencer had also drawn upon developments in 19th Century science to produce a theory which became known as ‘Social Darwinism’ – an attempt to apply Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to the study of human societies. These ideas were later developed by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. He was a polymath, who had achieved successes as a meteorologist, inventor, psychologist and anthropologist and traveller - but he was also one of the founding fathers of European eugenics. By the 1880s, Galton was a leading advocate of the policy of compulsory sterilisation – a necessary intervention, he believed, to prevent those of ‘inferior genetic stock’ from ‘breeding’.