| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

David Bindman. Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2002. Pp. 264. $39.95.

For better or for worse, European historians these days seem to be obsessed by, and nostalgic for, the eighteenth century. Here science was not yet professionalized, gender differences were not yet biologized, hierarchies were not yet racialized. All of this may well be true, although in fairness it should also be noted that eighteenth-century hospitals still killed more patients than they saved, eighteenth-century women in much of Europe remained illiterate, and eighteenth-century legal privileges still divided masters and serfs. As for racial discussions, the British as well as the Dutch, French, and Americans were happily profiting from the African slave trade, even if they had not fully developed "racial science." The nineteenth century, in contrast, saw vast improvements in transportation, medicine, and food production; the arrival of new educational and political opportunities for middle and even lower-class Europeans; and the end of slavery and serfdom. It was not all good, of course; but neither was European history after 1800 simply a straight, downward path leading inexorably to 1933. We need to stop romanticizing the premodern past and get a grip.

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