Book launch: Ethnos of the Earth

When: Tuesday, March 18, 2025, 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Where: Montagu Lecture Theatre (GC601), Graduate Centre, Mile End

Join us for the launch of Jaakko Heiskanen’s Ethnos of the Earth: International Order and the Emergence of Ethnicity.

Ethnicity is everywhere. From the delights of “ethnic cuisine” to the grim realities of “ethnic cleansing”, this concept is central to how we make sense of the world around us. But how and why has ethnicity become such a central part of our vocabulary? By reconstructing the first global conceptual history of ethnicity, Ethnos of the Earth shows how this concept emerged out of the crisis of European imperialism. Rather than being an ancient or natural phenomenon, ethnicity is a contingent product of the twentieth-century transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states. As nineteenth-century concepts such as “race” and “civilisation” were repurposed for twentieth-century ends, ethnicity emerged as a “filler” category that was plugged into the gaps created in our conceptual organisation of the world. Through this comprehensive conceptual reshuffling, the governance of human cultural diversity was recast as an essentially domestic matter, while global racial and civilisational hierarchies were pushed out of sight. A massive amount of conceptual labour has gone into the “flattening” of the global sociopolitical order, and the concept of ethnicity has been at the very heart of this endeavour.

This event will be followed by a reception.