The elevation of scientific discourse to a major component in the project of modernity and the Eurocentrism inherent in the Western scientific enterprise have aided both the development of racial hierarchies and the creation of the long-enduring myth of science as an impartial, pure and value-free endeavour, superior to other peoples’ modes of thinking. It is also to be argued that it is one thing to ‘discover’, identify, categorise and classify plants, beetles as well as peoples, but quite another to transform such categories and classifications into hierarchies that suggest stratification in terms of social and moral inferiority. The process of categorisation would then not in itself be normative, but rather evaluative attributions would be based upon moral and social preferences, subjective value judgements and the striving for political power.

The conundrum of the conceptual status and the socio-political consequences of the Enlightenment has not been resolved satisfactorily. Yet there now exists agreement on some parameters. The consensus is that scientific racism, racial medicine and colonial rule were for a time closely linked, variously reinforced and justified each other. Claims to racial superiority and Western scientific and medical hegemony are seen to have emerged alongside each other in the wake of the Enlightenment, culminating eventually not only in scientifically based racism in the nineteenth century and racial medicine in the twentieth century, but also in the perceived enhancement and legitimisation of colonial expansion by reference to medical and scientific progress. The interrelatedness of race, science and medicine, and its extension to the colonial realm during the nineteenth century, in particular, therefore constitutes one major focus for work and research.