Biopolitics and the making of race in the Enlightenment

Writing about Saint-Domingue (present day Haiti) in 1776, two men with connections to the French colonial administration, former governor-general Gabriel de Bory and a lawyer named Michel-René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, called for systematic selective breeding of people based primarily on the criterion of skin color and the correlation of characteristics of race and civil status. They appear to have been the first suggestions for large-scale selective breeding of humans that were meant to be carried out in a real time and place (rather than the fictional nowhere of utopias) and with the intention of creating a new racial hierarchy. It appears that the period from the 1750s to the 1780s in France and the French Atlantic colonies was important in bringing about significant conceptual transformations of ideas of race and biopolitics. A new understanding of the radical malleability of human bodies, as well as ideas about human breeding that were made possible by this understanding, seem to have played a significant role in the development of modern ideas of race. Bory’s and Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s proposals help bring this transformation into focus. Analyzing their proposals, I demonstrate that even as modern ideas of race were coming into being, both sides of the dialectic of race were already present. There was already a fundamental tension between those who wanted to increase human variation and “improve” races through mixing and those who wanted to erect new boundaries of reproductive segregation and create new categories of differentiation.