“This Happy Breed of Men:” Making an English Race from Expulsion to Exploration, 1290-1496 is a history of how racial systems coexisted and metastasized alongside one another in the centuries immediately before England began its participation in the transatlantic slave trade. While previous scholarship on the development of race and racial systems in premodern Europe has tended to emphasize the continuities and genealogies of racial ideologies from the medieval to the present, my book instead seeks to highlight the inconsistencies, misalignments, and chaos of race-making in the late Middle Ages. I argue that race in late medieval England was never just one thing, one way of thinking, but rather a miasma of intertwined ideologies, a social space in which several racial systems competed with one another. Thus, I conclude, there was never anything inevitable about the way race would develop in the early modern era or in modernity itself. Europe’s investment in the enslavement of Africans was a cataclysmic break in the development of racial thinking, and we should avoid privileging the human preference for historical continuity over an acknowledgment of abrupt change.

Moreover, my book argues that the making of race began not with the desire to explain human difference, but rather with the lust to annihilate human similarity. It was the longing to stratify the world, to make the racial self out of all the other selves that one was not. Provocatively, I argue that if not one person born in Africa or Asia or North America had ever set foot on English soil, if not one Jew or Muslim had ever crossed the English Channel, still the English people would have made race for themselves. Race was made in late medieval England because the late medieval English wished to understand what made them superior to their own immediate neighbors as well as the rest of the world. And the idea of a hereditary identity that was inherently exclusive, that crossed kinship networks but could also be restricted to them, was thus intoxicatingly appealing.

            In This Happy Breed of Men I identify several of the predominant racial ideologies that co-existed and competed in late medieval England, before focusing the book on the three most historically significant and “successful” racial ideologies: the theory of a noble race, the theory of a racial Christianity, and the racialization of the proto-nationalist state. I trace these three theories across time, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, arguing that the late medieval moment in England was particularly ripe for the birth and dissemination of racial ideologies because it was a time when “Englishness” itself was being actively defined, both in the British Isles and on the Continent.

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           This Happy Breed of Men makes a significant intervention not only in medieval studies, but also in the study of the history of race; it documents the historical and cultural specificity that leads to the construction of racial categories and lets us see race in unexpected and often provocative places. Working with a wide assortment of sources— historical chronicles, theological texts, literary writings, political legislation, and more—, the book offers a fresh perspective on how and why societies racialize themselves and others, as well as how racial ideologies coexist and intersect. This Happy Breed of Men also undercuts the self-mythologization of whiteness, by arguing first that whiteness is not a transhistorical category and secondly (and perhaps most importantly), that racialization is not a process triggered by human difference, but rather by the desire for differentiation on the part of those who fear human likeness and commonality.