What is racism? How do societies go from mere prejudice to discrimination and segregation? What deeper political, economic or social motives does racism serve? In his wide-ranging investigation on the subject, Francisco Bethencourt, Charles Boxer Professor of history at King's College London, comes up with a set of rich and nuanced answers to these questions, concluding that there is no single historical or social road to racism, but rather a diversity of racisms. That said, he mostly focuses on the Western world, arguing that Europe's imperial expansion allowed it to impose hierarchical and discriminatory relations on other human groups. (There is some description of the Ottomans' discriminatory treatment of non-Muslims under the Dhitnmi system and of their persecution of the Armenians, along with a chapter devoted to discriminatory attitudes in China, Japan, and India, near the end of the book.)
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