With science replacing Christianity as a framework for making sense of the world, leading European thinkers showed great dexterity in appropriating the new way of thinking as further justification for world domination. The early-nineteenth-century French naturalist George Leopold Cuvier contributed to a newly emerging field of scientific racism by declaring that “the Caucasian race has given rise to the most civilized nations, to those which have generally held the rest in subjection.”59
