Why were many 16th,17th,18th century European intellectuals

It was before intellectuals started to worship Equality. They believed men and women were different back then, too

>Be white man
>1400
>On an expedition to learn more about West Africa
>Land on a shoreline
>There are no ports or boats
>It is very hot and the trees are very different from Europe
>The sounds of those things Indians talked about were also rampant I believe they are called monkeys
>Walk onto the shoreline
>Call my men to get the cutting thing to cut through the dense growth
>As we cut through the growth we notice someting
>A black colored thing in the distance watching us
>What on earth is that thing"I thought"
>Suddenly another one appears but from behind us
>From the shape I assume its a human or a monkey that can walk
>I try to go near it but it runs away
>Hear calls from my men from the shore
>Arrive
>There are more of these things here
>Upon closer look they have a very primitive faces similar to Indians in the Southern part of their land, were these things human?
>They stared at us then began smiling,one raised its spear towards us and started yelling mindlessly, the rest seemed to do some bizarre body language involving moving their fingers around spasmodicly.
>One of my gun shoots it dead
>They all flee from the spot
>Hmmm I think could those be humans?

>Be white man
>1400
>Return to West Africa
>This time we encountered a village an opening in the jungle
>Their technology was paleolithic
>No science
>No books
>No written language
>No sophisticated religions
>No laws
>Absolutely anything that could be called human or civilized was nowhere to be found, there is just no way these things these blacks can be human they are another species

>Be Europe
>1600
>Spent the last century learning about the subhuman black race
>They are uncivilized deranged savages beyond all recorded history not even Indians or the savages of North America are comparable to these wild beast.
>There is no civilization to be found comparable to even ancient European states there is no way the negro can be equal to the white man no way possible.

those geographic factors is responsible for the divergence in the intelligence & cultural achievements of the 2 people, I think intellectuals today agree that sub saharan africans have lower IQ/achievements but they have the *potential* to achieve equality... lol we'll see

Arabs/persians were doing pretty fine and they didn't had it easy.

because they were intelligent?

Because people had money and could spend time thinking, rather than surviving.

This thread again?

maybe?

>They believed men and women were different
>were

because all material evidence in the context of the logic of the times made them certain these humans were somehow inferior, even tho this wasnt realy racism right from the start, racism started when they had good reason to instrumentalise such notions, so around the 1700eds when colonialism started picking up steam

in the 1600eds they still basicaly saw them as quaint, childish and misfortunate, living ''in their natural state'' there was a kind of mixture of sad disgust and patronising pitty about it

the notion of ''the savage'' was opposed to the image of a cultured civilised man, there was some implicit bigotry in this but generaly this wasnt realy seen as ''biologicaly inherent'', the reason for all this was generaly explained by them not being christian, or just being poor or whatever, but they werent realy denied their fundamental humanity

but realy at that time they didnt even consider others of their own ethnicity as ''equal'', let alone other ethnic groups, equality wasnt realy a operative term, society was based on institutionalised inequality, much the same as after the french revolution it became increasingly based in institutionalised equality, which is part of the reason why scientistic explanations for racist views became more and more prominent, people had to legitimise stuff like slavery and so on

in a certain way, race based slavery as was developed in colonial times was strangely a sign of west european cultures becoming more and more ''humane'' and ''egalitarian'', since obviously they needed some justification, some way to designate the other as not-realy-human, othervise the ethical system they operated under couldnt deal with it

Did they even knew other races personally? Hard to justify the racism if you never interacted with a black person once in your life.

>There is no civilization to be found comparable to even ancient European states
Except there was and when Europeans found it, they invented bullshit reasons why it was actually white people who came all the way to Africa and built it, rather than the "inferior" Natives

The green text means IN AFRICA user there is no african civilization comparable to the ancient european states.

yes, and there was, most of africa that wasnt literaly desert swamp and jungle was roughly at midieval ''level''

Nice fanfics, but none of this is actually true. Europeans encountered fairly well developed states along the Atlantic coast and even converted one of them to Catholicism. 15th-16th century accounts of the region are fairly positive.

It was in the later 17th and 18th centuries as the slave trade grew that impressions became more negative. As European demand for slaves grew enormously, slaves became more valuable than any manufactured goods. Instability, which produces slaves, became more profitable for elites than stability. Corrupt officials would sell their own people into slavery, tribes and kingdoms would attack each other to secure captives rather than territory, etc. Those who captured and sold slaves profited from trade with Europeans, while anyone who didn't grew comparatively weak and became preyed upon themselves. Any attempt to prevent or limit the trade ended in failure as those selling slaves became too powerful to subdue. The Kongolese monarchy fell apart as corrupt officials and invaders tore the kingdom apart, Benin fell to civil war in the 17th century, while the barbaric and predatory kingdom of Dahomey (often referred to as more a gang of bandits than a real state) became the major power in lower Guinea. Overall civilization drastically declined.

Europeans then, who had previously respected Africans to an extent as exotic, pagan but still sometimes civilized peoples (similar to many parts of Asia), came to interact with blacks only as either slaves or as barbaric slave-merchants while civilized kingdoms such as Benin and Kongo were largely forgotten.

There's more to it than that though; millions of blacks working in the Americas as cheap, disposable, unfree labour, distinguished by colour as a seperate caste from the white landowners, obviously contributed enormously to their dehumanisation. Racism furthermore scientifically justified slavery in response to any criticism of the practice.