Göttingen School of History
Christoph Meiners' 1785 treatise The Outline of History of Mankind was the
first work to use the term Caucasian ( Kaukasisch ) in its wider racial sense. (click on image for English
translation of the text)
The term Caucasian as a racial category was first introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen
School of History – notably Christoph Meiners in 1785 and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in
1795 [b][ page^ needed ]—it had originally referred in a narrow sense to the native inhabitants of the
Caucasus region.[25]
In his The Outline of History of Mankind (1785), the German philosopher Christoph Meiners first used
the concept of a "Caucasian" ( Kaukasisch ) race in its wider racial sense.[b][ page^ needed ][26] Meiners' term was
given wider circulation in the 1790s by many people.[c] Meiners imagined that the Caucasian race
encompassed all of the ancient and most of the modern native populations of Europe, the aboriginal
inhabitants of West Asia (including the Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arabs), the autochthones of Northern
Africa (Berbers, Egyptians, Abyssinians and neighboring groups), the Indians, and the
ancient Guanches.[36]
Drawing of the skull of a Georgian female by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach,
used as an archetype for the Caucasian racial characteristics in his 1795 De Generis Humani Varietate
It was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a colleague of Meiners', who later came to be considered one of
the founders of the discipline of anthropology, who gave the term a wider audience, by grounding it in
the new methods of craniometry and Linnean taxonomy.[37] Blumenbach did not credit Meiners with his
taxonomy, although his justification clearly points to Meiners' aesthetic viewpoint of Caucasus
origins.[38] In contrast to Meiners, however, Blumenbach was a monogenist—he considered all humans