When Leibniz wrote about what distinguished one people from another, he thought what mattered was language. (Indeed, he spent much of his life trying to persuade people to send him information about the languages of various peoples in Europe and Asia, for exactly this reason.) And if you read contemporaneous accounts of what distinguishes the various peoples of the world in the writings of European travelers and the thinkers who read them, the great debates were about the role of climate and geography in shaping color and customs, not about inherited physical characteristics. This shouldn’t be
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