“It is remarkable that the stupidest ape differs so little from the wisest man, that the surveyor of nature still has to be found who can draw the line between them.” So the “father of modern taxonomy” Carl Linnaeus declared in his influential twelfth edition of Systema Naturae (1766). In time, anthropocentric naturalists and ethnologists of the West would find succor in the fashion of civilization to segregate humans from all other life and reaffirm a human supremacist paradigm.

This talk traces the concept of “civilization” within the “race science of man,” from its emergence with Linnean taxonomy and the orangutan debates of the Eighteenth Century to its transformation in the Nineteenth Century with the racial science of the American School of Ethnology and the anti-racist interventions by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Such an analysis reveals how civilization crystalized during this period into an empirical instrument for discrimination that was core to modern Western racism and human exceptionalism, one that continues to influence the contemporary belief in a universal humanity that endures today.

Please note: the subject-matter of this talk contains sensitive imagery, language and violent themes such as racism, slavery, and human exceptionalism.

Dr Jacob Brandler is an intellectual historian interested in the history of racial science, human exceptionalism, and the praxis of veganism and anti-carnism. Having recently completed a dissertation entitled ‘Unfreeing the Other: The Reinvention of American Human Exceptionalism in the Antebellum United States, 1839-1859’ at the University Oxford, Jacob is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute and a Research Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. Jacob’s most recent publication was an essay that appeared in the collected volume Animal History: History as If Animals Mattered (2025).