Racialized Commodities

Abstract

Abstract Between circa 700 and 300 BCE, the ancient Greeks developed a vivid imaginary of the world’s peoples. Ranging from the light-skinned, “gray-eyed Thracians” of the distant north to the “dark-skinned Ethiopians” of the far south (as the poet Xenophanes would describe around 540 BCE), Greeks envisioned a world populated by human groups with distinct physiognomies. Racialized Commodities traces how Greece’s “racial imaginary”—a confluence of thinking about cultural geography, commodity production, and human physiognomy—emerged out of the context of cross-cultural trade between Greece and its Mediterranean neighbors over the Archaic and Classical Periods. For merchants, the racial imaginary might be used to play up the “exotic” provenance of their goods to consumers; it might also circulate practical information about customs, pricing, navigation, and doing business in foreign ports. Archaic Greek attempts to explain foreign bodies were rarely pejorative. But in the early Classical Period such images coalesced into the charged, idea of the barbaros, “barbarian.” Drawing from the historiography of trade in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Racialized Commodities adopts the model of “commodity biography” to investigate the entanglement of cultures, bodies, and things in Archaic and Classical Greece. Starting in the period circa 700–450 BCE, Part 1 focuses on the earliest images of African peoples, described by Greeks as Egyptians or Ethiopians, in Greek art. Part 2, which concentrates on the period between 550 and 300 BCE, seeks to explain how and why negative stereotypes of Thracians and Scythians were so widespread in ancient Greece.

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