Sarah C. Dunstan is a Lecturer in the International History of Modern Human Rights at the University of Glasgow. Her first book, Race, Rights and Reform: Black Activism in the French Empire and the United States from World War One to Cold War (Cambridge, 2021), won the American Historical Association's 2022 J. Russell Major Prize. She is also a co-editor of the award-winning Women's International Thought: Towards a New Canon (Cambridge, 2022). Ian Stewart is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Previous publications include The Celts: A Modern History (2025), and his work on ideas of language, nation, and race can also be found in journals such as Past & Present and the Journal of Modern History, among others.

• List of figures; List of contributors; Preface and Acknowledgements; Introduction Sarah C. Dunstan and Ian Stewart; 1. Racialising the world: civilisation, knowledge, and the crystallisation of race in European thought Ian Stewart; 2. The 'First' White death: royalism, revolutionary Haiti, and the (un)doing of race Jesús Garcia-Ruiz; 3. From Immanuel Kant to Heinrich Claß: Concepts of race in Germany during the long nineteenth century Jens-Uwe Guettel; 4. Emancipatory sociology and 'the Problem' of race relations: The First universal races Congress in 1911 London Alice L. Conklin; 5. Race and caste in Indian political thought Vikram Visana; 6. 'The intellectual equipment of mankind': UNESCO, scientific authority, and the problem of race, 1950–1967 Sarah C. Dunstan; 7. Rastafari and the 'Spectre of Racialism', 1950–1961 Monique Bedasse; 8. Subverting the settler colonial binary?: race, culture, power in Aotearoa New Zealand Miranda Johnson; 9. Race and blackness in the United States, 1968 to 2008 Robert Greene II; Afterword Alejandro de la Fuente.