Greece, the Middle East and Rome. The enormous colonnade at the entrance, completed in 1852, mimics the architecture of ancient Athens. The neo-classical style Londoners associate with this corner of the city owes itself to the fact that the British saw themselves as the cultural and intellectual successors of the Greeks and Romans.
Walk past the statues of Greek gods, their bodies considered the ideal of human physical perfection, and you’re witness to this narrative. Walk past the white marble sculptures removed from the Parthenon in Athens even as they crumbled, and you begin to see the museum as a testament to the struggle for domination, for possession of the deep roots of civilisation itself. In 1798, when Napoleon conquered Egypt and a French army engineer uncovered the Rosetta Stone, allowing historians to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs for the first time, this priceless object was claimed for France. A few years after it was found, the British took it as a trophy and brought it here to the museum. They vandalised it with the words, ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army’, which you can still see carved into one side. As historian Holger Hoock writes, ‘the scale and quantity of the British Museum’s collections owe much to the power and reach of the British military and imperial state.’
The museum served one story. Great Britain, this small island nation, had the might to take treasures, eight million exquisite objects from every corner of the globe, and transport them here. The inhabitants of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, as European explorers called it) built the enormous bust of Hoa Hakananai’a to capture the spirit of one of their ancestors, and the Aztecs carved the precious turquoise double-headed serpent as an emblem of authority, but in the nineteenth century both these jewels found their way here and here they’ve remained. To add insult to injury, they’re just two of many, joining objects thousands of years older from Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. No single item in the museum is more important than the museum itself. All these jewels brought together like this have an obvious tale to tell, one constructed to remind us of Britain’s place in the world. It’s a testament to the audacity of power.
And this is why I’m at the museum once again. When I set out to write this book, I wanted to understand the biological facts around race. What does modern scientific evidence really tell us about human variation, and what do our differences mean? I read the genetic and medical literature, I investigated the history of the scientific ideas, I interviewed some of the leading researchers in their fields. What became clear was that biology can’t answer this question, at least not fully. The key to understanding the meaning of race is understanding power. When you see how power has shaped the idea of race and continues to shape it, how it affects even the scientific facts, everything finally begins to make sense.
It was not long after the British Museum was founded that European scientists began to define what we now think of as race. In 1795, in the third edition of On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, German doctor Johann Friedrich Blumenbach described five human types: Caucasians, Mongolians, Ethiopians, Americans and Malays, elevating Caucasians – his own race – to the status of most beautiful of them all. Being precise, ‘Caucasian’ refers to people who live in the mountainous Caucasus region between the Black Sea to the west and the Caspian Sea to the east, but under Blumenbach’s sweeping definition it encompassed everyone from Europe to India and North Africa. It was hardly scientific, even by the standards of his time, but his vague human taxonomy would nevertheless have lasting consequences. Caucasian is the polite word we still use today to describe white people of European descent.
The moment we were sifted into biological groups, placed in our respective galleries, was the beginning of the madness. Race feels so real and tangible now. We imagine that we know what we are, having forgotten that racial classification was always quite arbitrary. Take the case of Mostafa Hefny, an Egyptian immigrant to the United States who considers himself very firmly and very obviously black. According to the rules laid out by the US government in its 1997 Office of Management and Budget standards on race and ethnicity, people who originate in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa are officially classified as white, in the same way that Blumenbach would have categorised Hefny as Caucasian. So in 1997, aged forty-six, Hefny filed a lawsuit against the United States government to change his official racial classification from white to black. He points to his skin, which is darker than that of some self-identified black Americans. He points to his hair, which is black and curlier than that of some black Americans. To an everyday observer, he’s a black man. Yet the authorities insist that he is white. His predicament still hasn’t been resolved.
Hefny isn’t alone. Much of the world’s population falls through some crack or another when it comes to defining race. What we are, this hard measure of identity, so deep that it’s woven into our skin and hair, a quality nobody can change, is harder to pin down than we think. My parents are from India, which means I’m variously described as Indian, Asian, or simply ‘brown’. But when I grew up in south-east London in the 1990s, those of us who weren’t white would often be categorised politically as black. The National Union of Journalists still considers me a ‘Black member’. By Blumenbach’s definition, being ancestrally north Indian makes me Caucasian. Like Mustafa Hefny then, I too am ‘black’, ‘white’ and other colours, depending on what you prefer.
We can draw lines across the world any way we choose, and in the history of race science, people have. What matters isn’t where the lines are drawn, but what they mean. The meaning belongs to its time. And in Blumenbach’s time, the power hierarchy had white people of European descent sitting at the top. They built their scientific story of the human species around this belief. They were the natural winners, they thought, the inevitable heirs of the great ancient civilisations nearby. They imagined that only Europe could have been the birthplace of modern science, that only the British could have built the railway network in India. Many still imagine that white Europeans have some innate edge, some superior set of genetic qualities that has propelled them to economic domination. They believe, as French President Nicolas Sarkozy said in 2007, that ‘the tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history … there is neither room for human endeavour nor the idea of progress.’ The subtext is that history is over, the fittest have survived, and the victors have been decided.
But history is never over. There are objects in the British Museum that scream this truth silently, that betray the secret the museum tries to hide.
When you arrive for the first time it’s almost impossible to notice them because they’re so easily ignored by visitors in a rush to tick off every major treasure. You join the other fish in the shoal. But go upstairs to the Ancient Egypt galleries, to the plaster cast of a relief from the temple of Beit el-Wali in Lower Nubia, built by the pharaoh Ramesses II, who died in 1213 BCE. It’s high near the ceiling, spanning almost the entire room. See the pharaoh depicted as an impressive figure on a chariot, wearing a tall blue headdress and brandishing a bow and arrow, his skin painted burnt ochre. He’s ploughing into a legion of Nubians, dressed in leopard skins, some painted with black skin and some the same ochre as him. He sends their limbs into a tangle before they’re finally conquered. As the relief shows, the Egyptians at that time believed themselves to be a superior people with the most advanced culture, imposing order on chaos. The racial hierarchy, if that’s what you want to call it, looked this way in this time and place.
Then things changed. Downstairs on the ground floor is a granite sphinx from a century or two later, a reminder of the time when the Kushites, inhabitants of an ancient Nubian kingdom located in present-day Sudan, invaded Egypt. There was a new winner now, and the Ram Sphinx protecting King Taharqo – the black king of Egypt – illustrates how this conquering force took Egyptian culture and appropriated it. The Kushites built their own pyramids, the same way that the British would later replicate classical Greek architecture.
Through objects like this you can understand how power balances shift throughout history. They reveal a less simple version of the past, of who we are. And it’s one that demands humility, warning us that power is fleeting. More importantly, they show that knowledge is not just an honest account of what we know, but has to be seen as something manipulated by those who happen to hold power when it is written.
The Ancient Egypt galleries of the British Museum are always the most crowded. As we walk past the ancient mummies in their glittering cases we don’t always recognise that this is also a mausoleum. We’re