When I embarked on this project several years ago, I had a suspicion – perhaps verging on a crude hypothesis – that the dethroning of biblical authority was a necessary prelude to the emergence of modern racism. Doctrinal racialism, it appeared, had not flourished in the early modern world, that era's terrible experience of race slavery notwithstanding, because, in large part, the message of the Christian scriptures constrained the development of polygenist ideas of multiple human origins. The onset of a distinctive ideology of innate racial differences seemed – at least superficially – to be connected to the Enlightenment critique of the historical and scientific validity of the Old Testament and the wider development of a culture of secularism. Full-blown racialism, I conjectured, was a secularised doctrine, untrammelled by the monogenist anthropology clearly articulated (or so it seemed) in Genesis, and reiterated in the message of universal brotherly love found in the New Testament, and underpinned by the explicit statement of universal kinship found in Acts 17:26.

In the course of my researches I came to realise that, while the logic behind my initial course of reasoning was not unsound, the historical record – even in the field of ideology – is replete with unpredictable and apparently illogical developments. The human imagination is equally capable of interpreting the Christian scriptures in a racialist as in an anti-racialist manner.