Professor Tommy J. Curry, University of Edinburgh
This talk explores an overlooked aspect of Britain’s conversations about racism: how Enlightenment thinkers portrayed Black and other non-white men as threats to white society. Figures like James Cowles Prichard and Samuel A. Cartwright used early racial ‘science’ to depict non-white men as dangerous and needing control. These ideas cast them as the ultimate ‘other,’ imagined as risks to social order and property. By tracing these roots, the talk reveals how these stereotypes still influence British politics today and fuel modern racial hostility.