The philosopher David Hume, one of the beacons of the Scottish Enlightenment, wrote in a footnote in 1753, “There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.” No empire of Mali, then, no Chinese philosophy, no architectural glories of the Mughal Empire. Immanuel Kant, the most influential European philosopher of the eighteenth century, famously declared, in 1764—it was not his best moment—that the fact that someone “was completely black from head to foot” was a “distinct proof that what he said was stupid.”
