On Racism in Europe

This is an outstanding book on the history of racism in Europe, from the biologization of race to the “present” (which, unfortunately, is 18 years ago). MacMaster pulls together a number of threads and essentially breaks racism in Europe down into two not-quite-discrete categories: “colonial” racism, which generally originated in the colonies and constitutes the racism most of us would recognize today, and anti-Semitism. However, it must be noted that these two categories do overlap at points and cannot be seen as entirely separately.

The primary weakness is that central and eastern Europe is not covered extensively, except for perhaps anti-Semitism in Russia, parts of Germany, and small sections on Poland and Hungary. The Balkans are not discussed at all. I still have many questions about views of race in eastern Europe, especially in the wake of the massive refugee crisis of 2015. This leads me to my next point.

This book is dated. Although MacMaster is a bit older now, I would sincerely appreciate it if he could issue a second edition of this book. A new chapter on racism in Europe in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis, and the “crisis” of multiculturalism (which, in my opinion, is profoundly overstated) would add a great deal of contemporary relevance to this work.