This essay has two objectives. First, it seeks to engage critically with contemporary scholarship on the origins of racism through the lens of an older debate centered around the history of ideas. Specifically, it argues that Quentin Skinner's influential critique of the history of ideas can help identify the pitfalls of our current fascination with the origins of racism—most particularly when such origins are traced back to antiquity and the European pre‐ and early modern periods. In pursuing its second objective, the essay turns from histories cataloguing ancient, medieval, and early modern racisms to objections leveled, in these same literatures, against scholarship defending the modernity of race. The defense of a premodern origin to race is, I argue, not just a historical argument but a contemporary politics embedded in a narrative of continuity that insists on the relevance of the medieval past to the racial configurations of our current moment. Rather than demonstrating continuity and sameness, this essay seeks to draw attention to alternative modes of historicizing that are more attentive to the alterity of the past.

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in recent years a spate of academic texts has been published on the subject of race -both on its historical emergence and on its contemporary legacy. But the field is not new. Through the 1960s, not surprisingly given the racial tensions within the United States, a number of primarily American scholarly works on race history had already begun to demarcate a field of enquiry. However, the more recent publications (over the last 15 years) are not simply 'updates' on earlier works but, rather, signal a substantive theoretical and historical shift in the field. Unlike, for example, Thomas Gosset's classic 1963 textbook, Race: The History of an Idea in America, which posited racism as a universal phenomenon that could be traced back to the ancient Greeks, the Aztecs, the Middle Kingdom of China and the Ghanaian kingdom, the more recent scholarship appears to have arrived at something of a consensus in arguing that racial discourse is a product of the West and a product of the modern (though the temporal boundaries that demarcate 'the modern' remain a source of debate). Contrary to arguments such as those proffered by Gosset,

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