"Generating Difference is a cultural and intellectual history of racial and reproductive thought and policy in Britain and its colonies over the long eighteenth century. Historians have tended to interpret the etymological roots of race in lineage, kindred, and descent as signifying an older mode of thought that was superseded by the biological, scientific concept of race that dominated from the early nineteenth century. In contrast, Generating Difference, by exploring the complex interrelationship of race and reproduction, argues that the historical meaning of the term persisted into the modern era and that, even in the heyday of scientific racialism, questions of racial identity were rarely resolved by reference to the physical body alone but rather by consulting individual genealogy"-- Provided by publisher."Explores the intersection of racial thought and reproductive science and policy across the British Empire.In Generating Difference, Andrew Wells traces the entwined histories of race, sex, and reproduction in Britain and its empire during the long eighteenth century. Challenging the assumption that the concept of race evolved in the modern era solely through new forms of biological science, Wells argues that older ideas of lineage, sexual reproduction, and bodily difference remained central to how race was understood, categorized, and enforced well into the nineteenth century. From the pages of Enlightenment science to colonial policy in the Caribbean, South Asia, and the Pacific, Wells shows how reproductive sex served as a primary framework for defining human differences. Concepts of identity were written onto bodies-especially those marked as non-white or non-male-through perceived differences in anatomy, fertility, and sexuality, albeit never unproblematically.

Whether in debates about slavery, interracial relationships, embryology, or population policy, the reproductive body became the crucible in which ideas about race and sex were forged and maintained. Offering a global scope beyond the Atlantic, including South Asia and the Pacific, and drawing from a wide range of sources-from satire to scientific treatises-Generating Difference brings the scholarship of race and sexuality into direct and compelling conversation. Wells uncovers how deeply reproduction structured imperial ideologies and how the policing of bodies helped naturalize hierarchy, control, and exclusion. At its core, the book reconsiders what made difference "visible" in a period before the dominance of the idea of racial biology"-- Provided by publisher.