History
History of Racism
A factual, cited timeline. Every entry below links back to its source — check them, and tell us if something needs correcting.
Why this history matters
Slavery is one of the oldest and most widespread institutions in human history, practiced on every inhabited continent and by peoples of every background — as both those who enslaved and those who were enslaved. For most of that history, who could be enslaved was decided by war, debt, piracy, or birth, not by race: slavery in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East "was not based on race or skin color in the same way as the later transatlantic slave trade." The idea that an entire race was inherently suited to slavery — the ideology this page is mostly about — is a comparatively recent invention, developed centuries after slavery itself had already existed almost everywhere. That history isn't about assigning guilt to people today for what others did, sometimes centuries ago. It's about recognizing exploitation and hatred as a shared human failing that has touched nearly every people at some point, so it can be recognized and refused wherever it resurfaces now.
- “Although slavery existed almost everywhere, it seems to have been especially important in the development of two of the world's major civilizations, Western (including ancient Greece and Rome) and Islamic.” — Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Slavery"
- “Slavery in the ancient Mediterranean wasn't based on race or skin color in the same way as the transatlantic slave trade.” — Dr. Chance Bonar, Tufts University (Tufts Now)
c. 3000 BCE – 5th century CE
Slavery in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world — including Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome — was not based on race or skin color in the same way as the later transatlantic slave trade; enslaved status typically resulted from war captivity, piracy, debt, or birth to an enslaved parent.
Source: Tufts Now (Tufts University)
594 BCE – 4th century CE
In Classical Athens, where enslaved people made up roughly a third of the population, slaves were acquired mainly through war and trade with non-Greek peoples after citizen debt-slavery was abolished around 594 BCE; in Republican and Imperial Rome, roughly 30 percent of the population was enslaved, drawn overwhelmingly from captives taken in Rome's wars of conquest.
pre-1492 CE
Slavery was practiced among numerous Indigenous peoples of the Americas independent of European contact, including Pacific coast societies such as the Klamath, Pawnee, and Yurok, as well as the Creek, Comanche, Kalinago, Tupinambá, the Inca, the Tehuelche, and the Aztecs — enslaved status was typically acquired through capture in war or self-sale.
650–1905 CE
Distinct from the transatlantic slave trade, the Islamic world's trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades trafficked an estimated 18 million Africans over more than twelve centuries — longer than the transatlantic trade, which ran from the late 15th century to 1867 and carried an estimated 7–10 million Africans to the New World.
c. 7th–8th century CE
In early medieval Ireland's law tracts, the "cumal" — literally "female slave" — served as the standard unit of value in Brehon law, equal to three milch cows or three ounces of silver; legal fines, debts, and land values were routinely reckoned in cumals, meaning an enslaved woman's price functioned as a base accounting unit.
Source: The Brehon Academy, citing Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law
c. 9th–12th century CE
The English word "slave" derives from "Slav": a medieval Latin term for the Slavic peoples took on the secondary meaning "enslaved person" because so many Slavs from Central and Eastern Europe were captured and sold into slavery in the medieval Mediterranean and Islamic world.
Source: Etymonline
c. 14th–17th century CE
Under the Ottoman devshirme ("child levy") system, Christian boys from the Balkan provinces were periodically conscripted, converted to Islam, and trained for service in the sultan's household — some becoming elite Janissary soldiers, others rising to high administrative and military office.
c. 1500–1866
Beginning around 1500, European traders forcibly transported millions of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, a system historians call the transatlantic slave trade.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
c. 1530–1780
From the 16th to 18th centuries, Barbary corsairs based in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco raided ships and coastal towns across Europe — as far as Iceland — capturing an estimated 1 million to 1.25 million European Christians and enslaving them in North Africa.
Source: Ohio State University News, reporting historian Robert C. Davis's research
1684
French physician François Bernier published one of the first attempts to classify humanity into distinct "races" based on physical traits, an early foundation for later racial pseudo-science.
Source: Understanding Race (American Anthropological Association)
1735
Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus published Systema Naturae, classifying humans into subgroups associated with specific physical and behavioral traits, work later cited to support scientific racism.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
1807
The British Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act, prohibiting the trade in enslaved people throughout the British Empire, though slavery itself continued in British colonies until 1833.
Source: UK Parliament
1830–1839
The Indian Removal Act, signed by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, authorized the forced relocation of Native American nations from the southeastern United States to land west of the Mississippi River; during the 1838–39 removal of the Cherokee, known as the Trail of Tears, approximately 4,000 of the roughly 16,000 people forced to march westward died from disease, exposure, and starvation.
1865
The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime.
Source: United States National Archives
1877–1965
U.S. states, mainly in the South, enacted Jim Crow laws mandating racial segregation in schools, transportation, and public facilities, enforcing second-class status for Black Americans.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
1882
The Chinese Exclusion Act, signed into law on May 6, 1882, imposed a 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States and barred Chinese resident aliens from naturalized citizenship; it was the first major U.S. federal law to restrict immigration explicitly on the basis of ethnicity, and exclusion provisions remained in effect until repealed in 1943.
1883
British scientist Francis Galton coined the term "eugenics" for a program of selective breeding intended to favor traits he deemed superior, an idea later used to justify racial hierarchies.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
1884–1885
European powers convened the Berlin Conference to divide Africa into colonial territories among themselves, with no African representation, formalizing decades of colonial expansion.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
1915–1923
The Ottoman government, controlled by the Committee of Union and Progress (the 'Young Turks'), carried out the systematic deportation and killing of the empire's Armenian population; historians estimate that at least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million Armenians were killed through massacres, forced marches, starvation, and disease.
1933–1945
Nazi Germany enacted state policy grounded in racial ideology that persecuted and murdered six million European Jews, along with Roma, people with disabilities, and other groups deemed racially inferior, in what is known as the Holocaust.
1939–1945
During World War II, Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators carried out a genocide of European Roma known as the Porajmos, killing an estimated at least 250,000 and possibly up to 500,000 Roma through mass shootings, deportation to concentration and extermination camps, forced sterilization, and forced labor — following centuries of legal discrimination, expulsion, and enslavement of Romani people across Europe.
1942–1945
Following President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 of February 19, 1942, roughly 112,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the U.S. West Coast were forcibly removed to inland incarceration camps; nearly 70,000 of them were American citizens who faced no charges. In 1988 Congress issued a formal apology and reparations through the Civil Liberties Act.
1948–1994
South Africa’s National Party formalized a system of legal racial segregation and white-minority rule known as apartheid, governing where people could live, work, and vote based on race.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
1950
UNESCO published "The Race Question," a statement by an international panel of scientists declaring that race is not a valid basis for claims of inherent mental or moral superiority and condemning racist doctrine.
Source: UNESCO
1960
South African police killed 69 Black demonstrators protesting pass laws in the Sharpeville massacre, an event that drew international condemnation of apartheid and later led the UN to designate March 21 as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
Source: United Nations
1964
The U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public accommodations and employment.
Source: United States National Archives
1965/1969
The United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), which entered into force in 1969 and remains a core international human-rights treaty against racial discrimination.
Source: United Nations OHCHR
1994
Over roughly 100 days beginning April 6, 1994, extremist Hutu-led militias, soldiers, and civilians in Rwanda killed more than one million people, overwhelmingly ethnic Tutsi along with moderate Hutu who opposed the killings.
Source: United Nations
1994
South Africa held its first fully democratic, multiracial elections, ending apartheid; Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the country’s first Black president.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
2002
Following a history of caste-based discrimination against groups such as Dalits in South Asia spanning centuries, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination adopted General Recommendation No. 29, formally confirming that descent-based discrimination — including caste and analogous systems of inherited status — falls within the scope of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
Source: UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
2016–present
Beginning with military 'clearance operations' in October 2016 and escalating sharply in August 2017, Myanmar's military carried out mass killings, rape, and the burning of Rohingya villages in Rakhine State, driving over 700,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. A 2018 UN fact-finding mission found evidence warranting investigation and prosecution of senior Myanmar military officials for genocide, a finding later echoed by the U.S. State Department in 2022.