Part one: Race before the advent of race. Louis XIV : king of the slaves ; Jean-Baptiste Labat : the priestly ethnographer

Part two: The new animal : man. François Bernier : the first classifier ; Carl Linnaeus : the botanist who transformed man into an animal

Part three: Race gets a history. Buffon : the man who put humans in time ; Voltaire : the philosophe who made racism drôle ; The Scots and stage theory : David, Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, and William Robertson

Part four: Race and the enlightenment. Kant and Blumenbach and the German definition of race ; Thomas Jefferson : nation builder, race builder

Epilogue: Enter the antiracists.